We then try to “improve” something, or worry about the future, or in some other way fail to simply be with the contentment. Suppose it is a beautiful day at the beach. Perhaps you are sitting on your blanket, sipping iced tea and basking in the sun. Everything is fine, but after a while you start getting a little bored. You take a book out of your beach bag and begin to read, but you find yourself feeling irritable. Then you realize that the main character in the story reminds you of your father, who never let you have any privacy. Even though you are by yourself, you suddenly get the feeling that someone is standing over you, judging you for relaxing on the beach and getting a tan rather than cleaning out the garage. You decide that it’s probably not a very good book and put it away. What you really want, you feel now, is something to eat. Halfway through eating your sandwich and chips, though, you realize you weren’t really hungry. Maybe a nap would make you feel better. You close your eyes, but now you are completely restless. The contentment of an hour ago is gone, and you don’t know how you lost it. This is how we live—trying to manipulate the outer world so that our inner world can be at peace. But this struggle is a hopeless task; it is not what will bring us to a state of contentment. This example of our internal process points to a basic fact of our ongoing experience: We don’t know how to leave ourselves alone. Every internal action involves some kind of rejection of our present state, our actual reality.
contentment. Suppose it is a beautiful day at the beach. Perhaps you are sitting on your blanket, sipping iced tea and basking in the sun. Everything is fine, but after a while you start getting a little bored. You take a book out of your beach bag and begin to read, but you find yourself feeling irritable. Then you realize that the main character in the story reminds you of your father, who never let you have any privacy. Even though you are by yourself, you suddenly get the feeling that someone is standing over you, judging you for relaxing on the beach and getting a tan rather than cleaning out the garage. You decide that it’s probably not a very good book and put it away. What you really want, you feel now, is something to eat. Halfway through eating your sandwich and chips, though, you realize you weren’t really hungry. Maybe a nap would make you feel better. You close your eyes, but now you are completely restless. The contentment of an hour ago is gone, and you don’t know how you lost it. This is how we live—trying to manipulate the outer world so that our inner world can be at peace. But this struggle is a hopeless task; it is not what will bring us to a state of contentment. This example of our internal process points to a basic fact of our ongoing experience: We don’t know how to leave ourselves alone. Every internal action involves some kind of rejection of our present state, our actual reality.
The human being is a multifaceted, multidimensional reality. To take one part of this reality, or a certain way of experiencing it, and believe that this is the ultimate, that this is what we should accomplish, is limited, partial, and ultimately static. The human being is a dynamic consciousness with intelligence and potentiality that we cannot encompass with our mind. And as far as it is possible to see, there is no teaching, no particular system, that encompasses everything. Each teaching takes a certain segment, a certain way, and says, “This is it.” This is a valid way to approach some kinds of realization, but it cannot contain the totality of the human being or the human potentiality.
Thus the mystery of Being can be seen as having two different implications. I believe the more fruitful one is not that there is nothing you can say about it, but that you can never exhaust what you can say about it. We can describe it and talk about it forever. So instead of calling it indeterminacy, I think a better word is inexhaustibility: The mystery is characterized by the fact that it is inexhaustible. You can never know it totally. So, for instance, when you say that the mystery is emptiness, this does not capture it completely. It does not give you the whole picture. You might say it is stillness. Well, you’ve then discovered something else about it, which helps you understand what it does to desires and agitations. When you realize this stillness, you experience that the whole universe is still. Yet, since you have an innately inquiring mind and you are inquiring into the stillness, the next day you realize that the mystery is not only stillness, it is also knowledge. What does that mean? Well, you knew it was stillness, and you knew it was emptiness, so knowledge must be intrinsic to it. But the next day, you realize that somehow defining the mystery as knowledge does not do it justice either. You can say that the mystery is stillness, you can say it is knowledge, you can say it is emptiness, but any one of these—and even all of them together—do not do it justice. So every day, you have a new discovery about the mystery, as if you were flying through the blackness of outer space and suddenly found you had alighted on a whole new star system that you can explore with joy and excitement.
We are seeing the appearance as if it were separate from or without its true nature.
Unless we discriminate this formless ground, we will never be able to perceive the forms of reality in their true fullness. Therefore, true nature must first be discriminated in order to serve as our orientation for the inner journey. In the realized state, this discrimination is transcended and true nature is finally recognized in its truth—as inseparable from reality.
Awareness is coextensive with, coemergent with, completely pervades true nature. Awareness in this sense is not aware of presence, it is the presence. Presence is a self-aware medium. In contrast, awareness in normal experience is patterned by the dichotomy of subject and object. There is always an awareness that is aware of something, where the awareness is the subject and the something is the object. Furthermore, awareness is commonly held to be a by-product of our brain and the physical senses. We tend to consider it to be a capacity inherent in certain sentient life-forms, directed and controlled by them, and limited in various ways by physical reality. The
The fact that we can feel, that we are sensitive to what we interact with, is the way the underlying unity appears in our experience. The capacity to feel is ultimately based on the capacity to love; and love unifies—it is an expression of oneness. The basis of the heart is love and love is the expression of the unity of Being.
We experience the dynamism of Being in the fact that our personal experience is constantly changing. One state follows another, one feeling replaces another, thoughts and images come and go in a never ending stream. But when the optimizing force is operating in us, our experience begins to deepen and expand, revealing new states, dimensions, and capacities. We refer to this changing, evolutionary flow of our experience as unfoldment. Our soul is then revealing its inherent potentialities. From this we see that the unfoldment of the soul is a direct expression of the optimizing creative force of Being’s dynamism.
True nature has no boundaries in terms of size, shape, or distance. In fact, true nature is beyond extension. When we fully experience true nature, the concept of space disappears. When that occurs, we recognize that there is no such thing as either distance or no-distance. The concept of extension disappears; we then experience it only as openness, as possibility. And because of this possibility, everything manifests, all the colors and shapes.
It is inherent to essential presence that it is not only awareness of presence
The moment you recognize that true nature is not bounded by your skin, that it is pervasive not only in the body but in everything else, you recognize that intrinsic knowingness is not the experience of one part of reality recognizing another part. The intrinsic knowingness is the fact that the inherent mirror-like awareness, which is everywhere and everything, has a discriminating quality. It can discriminate the variations that exist within itself. Objective reality is like an energy field with patterns and colors and forms, and this field has its own inherent capacity to know what these elements are. It can distinguish the red from the blue, the blue from the green, the rough from the soft, the soft from the hard. It can distinguish the fluid from the solid and the solid from the gaseous. This capacity is what we are calling discriminating awareness.
The ability to discriminate is inherent in our consciousness; that is why you can distinguish the pressure in your knee from the tension in your back. That is why you can differentiate the warmth in your heart from the heat in your pelvis, the emptiness in your belly from the thoughts in your mind.
You are aware of me talking to you; this is your knowingness. Apart from that knowingness, I cannot exist, as far as you are concerned. That does not mean that I do not exist; that is not what I am saying. What I am saying is that as far as your experience is concerned, I do not exist apart from your knowingness. Reality inherently possesses not only awareness, but a discrimination, a faculty that discerns what is encompassed in this awareness.
The inherent knowing of this whole field, with all its patterns, is sometimes referred to as the Divine Mind, or the
In that sense, because we discriminate ourselves from the whole field, we are all living in God’s mind; we are creations of God’s mind, contents of God’s mind. In fact, we are nothing but God’s ideas, because from the perspective of the presence of Being, all these forms are discriminations or concepts, and in some sense, words. Each form is a distinct vibration, with its own sound, but because each sound is known—inherently knowledge—it is also a word. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). What is the Word? Everything. My understanding of this statement from the Bible is that God is the presence, so the Word is with God, which is the knowingness. The Word is God because this knowingness is completely inseparable from the presence of God. You cannot separate them, except for purposes of discussion. The existence of the world and the differentiations within it are not separate. The world doesn’t exist apart from the mountains and the oceans and the stars; they are the same thing.
True reality is presence that has self-pervasive awareness that possesses at the same time a discriminating knowingness. This fact, which is important for inquiry, can be recognized in your own personal experience. Your normal experience is of being a person with awareness and a capacity to discriminate. But this discrimination is not a result of the mind’s labels; the labeling comes later. The inherent discrimination happens as a part of the awareness. You might discriminate the pattern of a tree outside your window and call it a tree, but your ability to discern the pattern of the tree is already there before you call it a tree. It is the same with the capacity to discriminate your inner impressions, such as various emotions, sensations, and thoughts. For example, your inherent recognition of sadness—the soft, warm dissolution of holding in the chest—exists prior to your mind’s labeling the experience “sadness.”
The knowingness inherent in presence, referred to earlier as the Divine Mind, was called by the Greeks nous, or higher intellect. When the Greeks, as in the case of Plotinus, used the word “intellect,” they did not mean discursive thinking. In fact, in Western languages, the word “intellect” originally meant “the inherent knowingness.” However, this changed mostly in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, when “intellect” began to refer to the representational knowing that goes on in our mind. Now “intellect” is applied only to mental knowingness, the egoic reflection of true knowingness. The inherent knowingness, or nous, was called the logos by some Christians, total intellect by the Sufis, and discriminating awareness by the Buddhists. Now, this discriminating awareness or knowingness is the source of all experience—the various impressions, forms, and colors. Whether they are ordinary physical experiences or unusual spiritual experiences, they are all the same to the inherent knowingness—they are all knowingness, at different levels and intensities of brilliance. The ego experience is just dull knowingness, while the essential experience is a bright knowingness, a luminous presence.
That is why I said before that a spaceship that originates from the star system we are traveling to is the most reliable vehicle we can use to go there.
The totality of the soul is a microcosm of all of reality, the unity of Being. The Diamond Guidance is a microcosm of the characteristic of the knowingness of God, the macrocosm of reality. But remember, on the level of true reality, the five characteristics are inseparable. The five facets are all intertwined and happening at the same time. We have described them separately in order to reflect on them, but they are all one reality. Consequently, the Diamond Guidance reflects all the five facets: awareness, oneness, dynamism, openness, and knowingness. However, the most important one, the most central one it reflects, is knowingness. I sometimes call the Diamond Guidance the essential nous, the individual soul’s version of the universal nous of the Greeks, as described by Plotinus. In Sanskrit, the essential nous is referred to as prajna, while the discriminating awareness—the universal nous—is called jnana. It is known in both Buddhist and Hindu teachings that you use prajna to arrive at jnana. Prajna is referred to as discriminating insight and jnana as inherent knowingness, or discriminating awareness. So prajna is the recognition of patterns, understanding, insight, realization, while jnana is the inherent self-knowing of pure awareness. Jnana is not the experience of a specific insight or understanding; it is the recognition that all experience is knowledge, and that you exist as knowingness, as knowledge.
Inquiry needs to involve elements of true nature itself to take us beyond conventional experience.
Superluminal travel is more like time travel, but not conventional time travel, because here the concept of time is transcended. Traveling superluminally means experiencing the very creation of time, as the unfoldment of all that exists. In superluminal flight, we cannot even talk about the drive as coming from the openness of Being’s essence. It is more that the openness is the vehicle itself. So the essence of Being, the mysterious emptiness, creates time. As it creates time, it creates experience, and this creation of experience is instant and immediate realization. In other words, in the third journey, the traveling is an immediate and continually spontaneous manifestation of realization. We call it superluminal flight because it is the recognition that perception at that level is nothing but the illumination of the Absolute essence of Being. There is the perception of this mysterious depth, and its
glimmerings are the manifestations of the various dimensions, the various star systems. Whereas in the second journey, the manifestations of Being continually shift from one to the next in a dynamic movement of the soul’s unfolding experience, in the third journey the unfolding is no longer a movement through time but a constant arising of all experience from the absolute source in the now. There is no spatial travel, no sense of process taking us to another dimension. The dimensions manifest spontaneously and instantly, as the continual emanations from the mysterious essence of reality. It is as if you remain in the same place, and experience merely manifests differently, through and around you, revealing new dimensions and realizations. This is in contrast with the first two journeys, which involve traveling in both space and time.
The Fuel For Travel
Our Being loves to rend the veils obscuring it because it loves to find out as much as possible about its truth. Our soul loves to travel into inner space, from one dimension to another. The journey is filled with thrill and excitement, with a celebrative and appreciative quality. When we are motivated by this selfless love, we want to call upon all our possibilities, all our capacities; we want to establish all the support we can for the journey, without caring about how difficult it is or about what is going to happen.
that love because otherwise the only reason and motivation for inquiry is a particular goal or aim, or to confirm an established position. Then we would ultimately be trying to assert a particular identity we’ve defined ourselves by, and that motivation will not take us anywhere new. Inquiry will not be possible because it is not open ended, and it will become locked into known territory.
The openness eliminates all the boundaries and positions that can limit our love, and it makes that love completely selfless, totally focused on truth. Love of truth here reveals its inner secret, as the love of Being to reveal its mysteries, as the force of the dynamism of Being that reveals the inexhaustibility of its essence.
Intelligently Responsive Inquiry
Inquiry is a science in the sense that it can be very objective, very precise. It goes beyond merely inquiring into facts in order to find the truth; it is also an art that needs an organic, wholehearted, comprehensive kind of responsiveness that is not rigid or bound by rules, concepts, or positions. Inquiry is a dynamic functioning of our consciousness, of our soul, that has to be flexible, responsive, and playful for it to be truly intelligent. It
In any inquiry, you have to consider that everything is constantly changing, that experience never remains fixed. For example, you might be experiencing a certain anxiety. As you inquire into your experience, you might encounter some kind of tension or a particular judgment. You have to take this into consideration in your inquiry; you cannot keep investigating the anxiety regardless of new factors, for the experience is no longer just anxiety. Defenses will arise, and different states and feelings will emerge, so inquiry will have to intelligently modulate itself to respond to this constantly changing scenario. Inquiry can be so responsive that at times it recognizes that it needs to cease for a while. You can reach a place where you feel it is the time to not ask a question but just to be in complete stillness. Inquiry can then reemerge spontaneously on its own, with fresh possibilities.
Inquiry requires the global awareness of mindfulness without identification so that you can see the entire situation you are working with. As you take on the whole situation, you start recognizing patterns. As you see the patterns, the inquiry starts focusing and concentrating on where all the patterns lead. For a while, the direction in which the patterns are leading becomes an object of inquiry, which you address with intense concentration. But the
The Power Of No Position
The intelligence we use in inquiry is the intelligence of the mystery of Being. This essence of Being is the
zero that is the source of all infinit-ies, the indeterminacy that is the source of all determinations and discriminations. More specifically, for intelligence to engage the hyperdrive, it has to have as its core the complete openness of indeterminacy, the absolute emptiness of the essence of Being. Otherwise, intelligence will be limited by the various ideas, positions, and concepts in the mind, by our ideas of what can happen and what can be. So intelligence needs to have as its source that indeterminacy, that complete mystery which gives it its maximum power, where intelligence can use all the understanding, all the knowledge we have without limiting the functioning of that intelligence. It can use its power, it can use its compassion, it…
We take a position in order to establish a sense of identity. So not having a position means we cannot have identity. That is why the essence of Being, the Absolute, is the experience of no position. When the inner core of intelligence is this absolute indeterminacy, then your inquiry flows without operating from any established position. You do not even adhere to the position that you are a human being—or beyond that, that you even exist. The next dimension might be complete nonexistence, so if you adhere to the position that you exist, how are you going to arrive at that dimension? Believing that you exist, or that anything exists, could become a barrier. But indeterminacy does not say there is either existence or no existence. It does not say anything. Indeterminacy means that you do not take a position, no assertion whatsoever. Complete freedom. During some stages of the journey, your travel is both spatial and hyperspatial. You alternate: Your power drive serves as the main propulsion system, and once in a while, when your identity is less fixed, you engage the hyperdrive. But as soon as your sense of identity reasserts itself, you have to go…
We can easily move from one dimension to another, for our mind is not limited by what we believe reality is. Then Being is not coaxed, it just manifests naturally, freely, and we are traveling in complete freedom. In the first journey, when we are still using the power drive, we need to use effort, we need to struggle, we need to discipline ourselves. At that point, inquiry cannot happen except with disciplined determination, commitment, and strength, with the intentional application of our intelligence. We have to use our own power. But when the hyperdrive is engaged, there is a spontaneity and a flow. We do…
However, inquiry can be so open ended, so open and free, that sometimes it even allows certain fixations or positions for a while. Positions are different states you can experience: “I am this, I am that. I am peace, I am stillness, I am love, I am space…” In its intelligence, inquiry can recognize that one of these positions might be useful for a period of time. So when you recognize the value of taking a particular position temporarily, your Being will allow you that. Within the perspective of inexhaustibility, you can take a position, but you do not adhere to it; you are able to get off…
When you finally embark on the third journey, that which invites the unfoldment is completely inseparable from the unfoldment itself. This is nondual realization, where experience is pure illumination and unfoldment, where every moment is a spontaneous inquiry, a revelation of the inexhaustibility of Being.
The relationship can be expressed as follows: Inquiry invites understanding through the revelation of truth, thus transforming knowledge. To begin to know what this means, we will consider the question: What is knowledge?
Knowledge, Understanding, And Truth
If you look at your experience at any moment, you will see that it is a kind of knowledge. Experience is inseparable from knowledge, and in fact is completely knowledge. Experience is so intertwined with knowledge that you cannot say, for example, “My knee hurts,” without the knowledge that you have a knee, what a knee is, what hurt is, and the various other pieces of information that constitute your experience of the knee hurting. All of this is knowledge. You cannot say, feel, or think, “I feel loved by you,” without knowing there is a you, there is a me, there is love, and what love feels like or means. All this is knowledge. Even not-knowing your experience is knowing, is knowledge. Even “I don’t know what is going on with me” is knowledge.
experience, but you also are in touch with the meaning of the experience. There is not just the knowledge of the fact of the experience itself, but also a cognitive appreciation of its significance.
Another example: You notice by being mindful of your experience that it is important for you to be successful, that throughout the years you have been after success in many ways. As you inquire into this tendency and are open to this question of success, you might become aware of an agitation that drives you. You can’t sit still; when you sit for a short time you get restless, so you get up and do something. This agitation is a new piece of knowledge that transforms your experience. You now have more than just the knowledge of merely getting up and doing something. If you are curious about this agitation, you might ask, “How come?” and then you might begin to recognize an underlying emptiness. This is a new truth that you have found: It is this underlying emptiness that is driving you toward success. So the truth changes: The first truth you discovered was the agitation, the next truth was the emptiness. Both truths are relative: Each is true as it is happening, but later on it is no longer relevant. And if you explore the emptiness with the same openness and interest you had during the initial experience of restlessness, you might recognize that the emptiness makes you feel that you are not a competent person because you interpret it as a lack of capacity. Again, inquiry invites the truth, and truth transforms knowledge, resulting in understanding.
Dynamism And Ordinary Knowledge
To answer this, we need to appreciate that knowledge comes in various forms, the most common of which is ordinary knowledge. Ordinary knowledge is what is generally meant by the word “knowledge”—all the knowledge you have in your mind. Whenever knowledge becomes a memory, it is ordinary knowledge. It is the totality of your accumulated information: things you learned in school and things you were told or have read about, as well as things you have learned from your own direct experience. For instance, you have learned from experience that you have a body. That is ordinary knowledge. You were told you are that body, and that too becomes remembered knowledge. Now, if you take the concept that you are the body and adhere to this ordinary knowledge as truth, it will limit your openness to the creative dynamism. You will not be open to that dynamism to reveal that you are not a body but something else—consciousness, for instance. This example makes it easy to appreciate that our optimizing dynamism becomes bogged down due to our identification with images, structures, points of view, positions, concepts, beliefs, preferences, prejudices, and so on—all forms of ordinary knowledge. This thwarts and distorts the creative unfoldment of our Being.
It is true that Being always unfolds—dynamism cannot be stopped or completely thwarted. However, it unfolds either freely or in a distorted way. When rigidity patterns our experience in a fixed way, this distorts the manifestation of the dynamism, and the creativity of our Being comes out in a darkened, dull, and disordered way. Understanding these distortions reveals the qualities of Being that are being blocked by the distortions, and thus helps us to see how the creativity of Being itself is distorted and constrained.
The distortions, including emotional pain and difficulties, are nothing but the presentations of the dynamism of Being happening through the filter of our ordinary knowledge. Fixed beliefs, attitudes, and positions, mostly based on ego structures and defenses, impede and distort the flow. What you end up with is a painful, constricted, and dark repetition of old knowledge.
For instance, our knowledge patterns our experience to the extent that we actually experience a physical reality. We end up believing that there is such a thing as physical reality and physical matter. In fact, we are completely convinced that physical reality is a fundamental truth. In objective reality, there is no such thing as the physical world that we know. If we experience our body without the filter of ordinary knowledge, we will not experience a physical body, we will experience a fluid patterning of luminosity.
From that point of view, how can we possibly think of it as a fluid patterning of luminosity? This is just an example, maybe a little extreme, to tell us how far the patterning of ordinary knowledge goes. In the initial stages, the process of inquiry is mostly an investigation of ordinary knowledge. Why? Because it is an investigation of our present experience, and if we have an experience and don’t know its meaning, that tells us there is a piece of ordinary knowledge implicit in it that we don’t see yet. So by exploring your present experience, you are actually exploring how ordinary knowledge is patterning it. A good example of this was mentioned earlier: the unconscious belief that you are an incompetent person, which underlies your drive for success. This unconscious belief is part of ordinary knowledge implicit in your present experience, determining that experience without your knowing it is there. From this insight, you recognize how events that happened in your childhood—perhaps you were put down by your teachers, or your parents didn’t believe you could do anything well—caused you to start believing you are incapable. That became a self-image impressed in your mind, which is a piece of ordinary knowledge that now patterns your experience in such a way that you are always driven toward success. So investigating your present experience at first often means investigating how ordinary knowledge is patterning your experience.
Truth And Ordinary Knowledge
Truth is dynamic and in some sense mysterious. We can
never fix it and make it static. Many problems arise when you take knowledge to be truth. The first is that beliefs and information can be incorrect. This is not unusual, as the history of science illustrates. Science is a set of approximations that are always being corrected. We usually characterize our knowledge in physics or mathematics, for…
The second problem is that indirect knowledge—knowledge you get from other people—is not true knowledge even if it is correct. It is not yet what we call personal truth, not experiential or perceptual truth. People tell you things, you learn things in school, you hear or read things. All this is not true knowledge, it is only secondhand belief and conviction, beliefs taken on faith. There is no certainty here, and yet your belief may prevent you from perceiving reality in any other way. For instance, each one of us believes that our body is composed of atoms. Do we really know that? We have heard it, read it in chemistry books, but it is not direct knowledge. We don’t really know. It is knowledge based on faith. It has been useful in the development of our technology to think that our body is composed of atoms, but if scientists took this as absolute truth, our science would not advance. The third problem is that reliance on information and assumptions communicated by others establishes in us the habit of not exercising our own intelligence. Then our capacity to know, and our love of knowing, weaken in ways that we do not even notice, especially in terms of experiencing and knowing ourselves. That is why it…
We need to rely more and more on our own immediate, direct knowledge. However, even true knowledge based on our own experience is composed of concepts, labels, ideas, images, and so on. So it exists only as a memory. For instance, you work on yourself and you have the experience of being an ocean of consciousness. This is a true, direct knowledge of your consciousness. But the next moment, it is just memory, an image, concept, idea, impression from the past. It is true knowledge in that you got it directly, but it immediately becomes ordinary knowledge, old knowledge. If you keep thinking that who you are is an ocean of consciousness, this will disconnect you from your immediate experience, even though the statement is both…
the recounting of that experience is not the truth. It is truth only if it is the immediate experience of essential reality now. Your immediate experience might not be of Essence at all, or of Essence manifesting in the same way. If you are holding on to the thought, “I am Essence…
This is because the experience of Essence is the immediacy of experiencing your Being and you cannot connect to that…
Practice Session: Your Past Experience with Inquiry With this chapter, we begin an ongoing structure in the book called a practice session. This is a support for you to experience the inquiry process for yourself. We will suggest specific questions related to the material of the chapter for you to investigate. You are encouraged to do these inquiry exercises either verbally or through journaling, alone or with fellow explorers. A good place to begin now is with an exploration into your past experience with inquiry. Give yourself fifteen minutes to sit with and reflect on these questions and any associated insights that arise. What kind of self-inquiry have you done? Did you like doing it? Was it revealing, satisfying, challenging, disturbing, or something else? How do you see your concerns, your capacities, and your limitations in relation to inquiry? How fixed is this knowledge about yourself? How does that knowledge affect your experience of inquiry now and your openness to pursuing it further?
Inquiry And The Mystery
An open-ended inquiry means that the rigid patterns in our experience can be transformed into fluid patternings of a self-organizing flow. Before we enter into the process of questioning and inquiry, our experience is rigidly patterned; it arises in repetitive, compulsive, obsessive patterns.
Even with that dissolution, our experience doesn’t lose its sense of pattern, and this is because pattern is the sense and meaning of experience. We still recognize patterns in our experience, but there is a more fluid and fresh patterning to the flow of experience. It has a fluidity and smoothness, a lightness and spontaneity to it. We feel free. When your experience is in rigid patterns, you are in prison. When your experience flows in fluid patterns, you feel the freedom of experience.
Wonderment arises when you are open to something that is mysterious, new, and fresh, when your old knowledge is completely suspended for the moment.
The journey of inquiry takes us from knowledge to mystery. Our inner guidance reveals to us the truth and richness of our Being, but the more it reveals the truth and richness of our Being, the more we are in touch with the mystery.
To go from knowledge to mystery means to jump…
Basic…
Now we will shift to hyperdrive to take us beyond the reality we are used to and into a much subtler awareness that challenges our usual assumptions. We need the hyperdrive to jump to this different dimension and understand a different kind of knowledge that we call basic knowledge. The focus of the previous chapter was on how our old knowledge—our ordinary knowledge—patterns, influences, and determines our present experience and how inquiry opens up our present experience by questioning that patterning. We have also discussed…
Direct…
Experience is inseparable from knowledge in a much more fundamental way, however, than being patterned by old knowledge. In fact, our experience is knowledge. How so? Take the simple case of experiencing your knee. Included in that experience is the knowledge of what a knee is, what seeing is, what sensing is, what the body is, and what pressure is. So you cannot experience the knee except as a collection of various pieces of knowledge. But the experience is also knowledge in a more fundamental way than that. If you reflect for a minute, it is not very difficult to see that your experience of the knee is knowledge. But it is not merely that you know what a knee is. You do know what it is—and that knowing is knowledge—but knowing what a knee is is ordinary knowledge. Your experience of the knee is one of shape, sensation, and pressure. What is that? An impression. This…
An impression is knowledge, but it is not ordinary knowledge. It is information that exists right in this moment, regardless of what you think about the experience or what you know about knees. Can you experience your knee apart from the sensations and impressions? Is there a knee in your experience apart from the impressions? You might separate…
This is what we call direct knowledge, or knowledge acquired through directly perceiving something in the moment. It is not secondhand. You might not even call your knee a knee. You might forget everything about what knees are, but the sensation will still be there, the shape will still be there, the temperature will still be there,…
The direct knowingness of fear is the same as the experience of fear. Is there any fear apart from the experience of the knowingness of fear? No. This knowingness of fear is what I call basic knowledge of fear; it is fundamental to our experience. Our actual experience is nothing but this basic knowledge.
Experience As Basic Knowledge
We usually don’t call it knowledge; we call it experience, and if we are a little more sophisticated, we call it perception. Perception carries more of the sense of being aware of your immediate experience, which is the palpable sense of knowingness that is basic knowledge.
Now, this knowingness of our experience in the moment of perceiving it has a profound and unsettling implication if we pay attention. This is the hyperdrive jump that shifts us out of our familiar mind. Usually we think of our experience in terms of the duality we have developed as the experiencer and the experienced, the perceiver and the perceived. In terms of the example of fear, we would say, “There is fear and there is me perceiving the fear.” We think fear exists someplace on its own, and the perceiver is someplace else, looking and thinking, “Oh look, there is fear.” This is the familiar and assumed position that we are in some separate place of observation viewing the world and our experience. But when you experience fear, are you the perceiver separate from the fear? Remember, we are speaking now about the immediate level of direct perception. Can you ever separate in your experience the perception of the fear from the fear itself? It is not possible. The perception of the fear is the same as the experience of the fear, which is the same as the presence of the fear. It’s as simple as that. The perceiver and the perceived actually exist together as the experience. If we set aside the duality of the perceiver and the perceived, then what is actually there is consciousness aware of itself as fear. More accurately, there is a consciousness aware of a manifestation within itself as fear.
The soul is a field of consciousness that has experience because the experience is an arising within the field of that consciousness. Its experience does not happen outside of that field. Thus the soul is both the experiencer and the medium of experience. So the experiencer and what is experienced are not separate. The soul manifests part of itself as fear. It is not a soul over there experiencing its fear as separate from itself, as if through a telescope. The awareness, which is the nature of the soul, is in the fear itself.
the observer and the observed, the individual and the experience, the consciousness and the body, and so on. So we have to go through many pathways to investigate these dualities before we…
Again coming back to the example of the knee: If you don’t think with your ordinary mind—which overlays ideas and frameworks onto your experience of the…
Essence And Basic…
Knowledge is still seen as the meaning or insight that you discern from your immediate perceptions. You believe that it is something added to the simple perception. Thus in conventional experience, when you see some relative truth, you end up with insights, and the content of those insights is considered to be knowledge. At some point, however, you come to the recognition of what we call “essential truth.” Essential truth is not an insight about something but the apprehending of the immediate reality of the moment. This immediate reality is presence—the quality of beingness—as when one is experiencing an essential aspect, such as Compassion or Strength. We find out here that one of the most important characteristics of essential presence is that it is self-aware consciousness. So if I am experiencing the presence of stillness, which is one flavor of essential Peace, nobody needs to be outside the stillness to be aware of the stillness. I and the stillness become one thing. My familiar sense of being a separate observer dissolves. There is no observer and no observed. The…
Our mind can associate all kinds of things with peace—what it is not, what agitation is, what it would mean to be peaceful. All of these things are ordinary knowledge, but the direct apprehension and recognition of the stillness is what happens right at this moment and is independent of what our mind says. In fact, we might not even call it stillness. If we don’t speak English, we won’t call it stillness, but it is still the same experience.
Not only is basic knowledge “live” in the sense of existing only in the present, and thus unstorable like random access memory (RAM) on a computer, but it is also “live” unlike any computer knowledge, in the sense of being self-aware and self-knowing. One of the most important things we learn when we start to experience Essence is that the presence knows itself, but the presence and the knowingness of the presence are completely indistinguishable; they are not two things. This is similar to the way water is wet, yet the wetness is not separable from the water. Our essence has the capacity to know itself completely and directly, independent of what we have known in the past. The knowingness is inherent in the essence itself, in such a way that it not only is aware of itself as existing, but is also aware of the quality and characteristics of this existence.
Experience As Basic Knowledge
The moment you recognize Essence, it is possible to transcend that duality. In knowing Essence, we begin to recognize basic knowledge, and we embark on a journey into a new way of knowing, a direct and immediate knowing.
We usually think, “There is me, aware of a thought.” If we inquire a little deeper, we recognize that this statement is based on ordinary knowledge, the belief that there is an observer separate from the thought. If we continue this self-reflection, especially when we go beyond our belief in the observer, we recognize that the thought itself has awareness. We are aware of the thought because the thought itself is luminosity with a certain flavor and information. The thought itself is not separate from awareness, and awareness is knowledge; thus the thought itself is knowledge. It is not that the thought carries knowledge, as in ordinary knowledge; the thought is knowledge. It is consciousness with a certain form, and we call that form information. The knowingness pervades the thought itself as if the thought were some kind of fluid moving around and taking a shape. The shape it is taking is a concept or word that we recognize from ordinary knowledge. But the whole thing—the consciousness arising as thought fluid, which is formed into concept shapes—is knowledge, for it is consciousness with content.
However, if we have the global awareness that comes through the development of mindfulness, it is possible to recognize that the true ground of our experience is actually a medium of awareness, rather than a collection of perceived objects. This medium of awareness that we call the soul has things bubbling in it. The bubbles are not separate from the medium, and the medium itself is self-aware. The bubbles are different colors and shapes: This bubble feels like sadness and that bubble feels like pain, this bubble feels like the idea of a bird and that bubble feels like the thought of a person, and this bubble is an image of our home. All these bubbles are arising in the same medium.
With experience we ask, “What is next?” but with knowledge we ask, “What is this?” and all kinds of possibilities open up.
Some people feel that they don’t know anything. Others may experience that their head is literally empty. But what is that emptiness except knowledge? What is the experience of being stupid? Knowledge. What is the experience of not-knowing? Knowledge. What is the experience of intelligence and brilliance? Knowledge. Knowledge is the ground that underlies and allows all possibilities, qualities, discriminations, and actions. This sense of all experience being knowledge also holds true in the realm of action. What is action? You can say, “I moved my hand.” Is moving your hand separate from the immediate knowingness of the experience of moving your hand? What is the actual experience of moving your hand? It is information unfolding. Taking an action is nothing but a flow of knowledge. That is what we call “unfoldment,” and we call it unfoldment because there is change. An action is some kind of change. And change or action is nothing but a flow of knowledge.
Basic Knowledge And…
Where does ordinary knowledge come from? It comes from direct experiences that have already happened—either direct experiences in your consciousness or direct experiences of something you have heard or seen or read. What is reading but the knowledge of the experience of reading? Reading the book itself is knowledge. I don’t mean the knowledge of the content of…
Ordinary knowledge is in some sense a subset of basic knowledge. However, because we can think of ordinary knowledge as knowledge that is stored someplace and becomes accessible at certain times, we can conceptualize it as not an experience, and hence as separate from basic knowledge. But in reality, whenever there is ordinary knowledge in operation, it is arising as experience in the moment and thus is basic knowledge. If you think of your experience yesterday,…
Basic knowledge is never static; it is always moving. Now you are sad, now you are angry, now your knee hurts, now there is a thought, now there is an image. It is always moving and…
And because basic knowledge is a presence of self-awareness and self-knowingness, inquiry, then, is actually basic knowledge inquiring into basic knowledge. What happens in inquiry is that basic knowledge is inquiring into itself, and through this inquiry is liberating itself from the influences of a subset of itself, which is ordinary knowledge. Ordinary knowledge is knowledge that comes through memory. In conventional experience, basic knowledge does not experience itself directly but through the veil of these memories. Inquiry penetrates these veils so that basic knowledge can begin to experience itself without their influence. So experience is always basic knowledge, but that knowledge can be more or less direct, more or less immediate. The more immediate basic knowledge is, the more luminous it is and the more it embodies the sense of truth, presence, and awareness. When this purity is complete, we have arrived at the…
Practice Session: Your Experience in the Moment In this inquiry, you will not be exploring a particular issue or subject but observing and investigating what is arising in your experience moment to moment. Take fifteen minutes to stay with this present-time exploration. Begin with simply being aware of the various elements in your experience: bodily sensations, emotional feelings, mental activity, what you see and hear. Report or write what you are aware of and notice how that process affects your experience. Notice what draws your attention in your experience and then look more closely at that, describing what you see. Be aware
of when you relate to your subject of inquiry through old ideas or positions and when you experience it with more immediacy and freshness. See if you can tune in to the sense of immediacy and openness of direct contact with your experience in contrast to the familiar feel of what you already know. What is it like to be in touch with and perceiving your experience so directly? What do you feel you have to give up in order to be so immediate? What draws you back into the familiar territory of ordinary knowledge?
Differentiation And Discrimination In Basic Knowledge
At some point in our second journey, our spacecruiser takes us to a realm of experience where we recognize ourselves as awareness. This awareness is not only aware of its own presence, but it also has the capacity to discriminate. The fact that my experience arises indicates that there is differentiation in this awareness. In other words, there is experience because there is an awareness of different elements that make up my experience and those elements change. Otherwise, there would be no experience. Pressure feels different from heat, heat feels different from sadness, sadness feels different from anger, anger feels different from pain, pain feels different from relaxation, and so on. Even if I remove all the names and labels from the elements of my experience, even if I suspend all of my knowledge from the past, my experience will still remain differentiated. Not only differentiated, but discriminated as well. In other words, this awareness, which is my presence, is capable of recognizing the differentiated qualities.
When you experience Strength or Compassion, you don’t need to compare them to each other to know them. You can know the Strength Essence just by experiencing it; you recognize how strong and hot it is on its own. When you experience the Compassion Essence, you directly experience the gentleness of it, the warmth of it. When you feel Strength, your intelligence makes you act in a way that you wouldn’t act when you are feeling Compassion. Even if the functioning of your mind were suspended, making all ordinary knowledge inoperative, you would still tend to move your body in a strong, expansive way, speak loudly, and assert yourself—all characteristics of the Strength Essence. This means that our intelligence has the capacity to inherently discriminate and recognize a particular quality, not just differentiate it. All these functions occur before the mind begins labeling. Experience ordinarily includes various kinds of psychic operations, all simultaneously present and functioning at different levels in experience. There is consciousness, then there is differentiation, then there is discrimination, and then comes labeling. They all go on at the same time but are interrelated in a nearly instantaneous chain of arising. As soon as labeling begins, ordinary knowledge comes into operation. The act of labeling creates the link that associates information from the past—ordinary knowledge—with what is occurring now in your experience, that is, with basic knowledge. When you recognize that your consciousness has inherent
a discrimination that is inseparable from the capacity to discriminate and is prior to labeling, you are recognizing basic knowledge, which is the ground and the basis of all experience. From basic knowledge arises every kind of knowledge, experience, insight, and action.
Inquiry As Knowledge In Action
Basic knowledge has the capacity to separate itself into parts and begin experiencing itself as one part (such as the head) viewing another (like the knee)—as if the experiencing consciousness were located in one part and not in others. Basic knowledge does this by unfolding a part of itself through a piece of ordinary knowledge, such as an image of a self in a separate body, and that knowledge or image becomes a veil it looks through. This veil makes it see a duality where there isn’t one. Similarly, basic knowledge has the capacity to free itself by becoming intelligent about seeing through these limitations, by recognizing more of its possibilities.
To put it succinctly, ordinary knowledge is carried by thoughts whereas basic knowledge is carried by perception. Ordinary knowledge cannot be separated from thoughts, and basic knowledge cannot be separated from perception. Inquiry is the action of the optimizing thrust of Being’s intelligent dynamism that opens up basic knowledge, liberating it from the cramping influence of ordinary knowledge. When basic knowledge is liberated from the filter of ordinary knowledge, it reveals itself as the discriminating awareness of Being, the wisdom of discrimination. In other words, we recognize that this inherent discrimination is the source of discrimination in basic knowledge, and hence in ordinary knowledge. Basic knowledge spans the distance between the wisdom of discrimination—one of the fundamental characteristics of true nature—and conventional experience, which is basic knowledge filtered through ordinary knowledge. From this perspective, it is possible to see inquiry as a vehicle that takes us from conventional experience to enlightened perception, through the understanding that transforms basic knowledge back to its source, the wisdom of discrimination. Remembering that another characteristic of true nature or reality is its unity, we see another important fact about basic knowledge. Not only is our inner experience knowledge, and not only is our experience of external phenomena knowledge, but all phenomena—inner and outer—are knowledge. The wisdom of pervasiveness, of unity, eliminates the boundaries that separate percepts in basic knowledge, revealing them only as the lines of demarcation that allow discrimination. We then see that all of reality, the whole universe, is knowledge.
Not-Knowing
Freeing Up Basic Knowledge
As human beings, we naturally want to free basic knowledge, for this means freeing our experience. That is our liberation. Freeing basic knowledge means freeing Being to manifest itself in whatever form its intelligence guides it to. Our Being is then spontaneous, free, and truly responsive to the particular situation instead of being held captive by the demands of our past, especially the constraints imposed by our conditioning. Our liberation is a matter of releasing basic knowledge from the distorting and limiting influence of ordinary knowledge, so that experience becomes the pure, direct display of the discriminating wisdom.
However, our experience is usually limited and repetitive. It tends to become stale because of the heavy inertia and fixed boundaries imposed by our ordinary knowledge. Because of these boundaries, we experience ourselves and the world as objects, as entities interacting and doing this and that. We tend to always experience ourselves as this object that we call a self, which goes to sleep and wakes up and has a job to do, and likes certain things and doesn’t like other things. For instance, you might wake up one day and feel, “God, what a terrible day; I have to do all these things I don’t feel like doing.” This is connected to a self-image of being a person whose life is always an imposition, who always feels put upon. You live as if your life were always limiting you, putting pressure on you to behave one way or another. And you can live your life like that forever.
Because we take this old knowledge to be true and final, we end up living in what appears to us to be a familiar world inhabited by our familiar selves. In other words, we wake up every morning and find ourselves to be this familiar self inhabiting this familiar world because of the positions we have taken based on the dictates of that old knowledge. But this is a delimitation; we have determined what reality is: “I am such and such, this is reality, this is how I live, this is what I do.” And we take the position that these definitions are final and non-negotiable. However, we have seen that the essence of reality is indeterminacy. So how can we take the position “Well, I am this kind of a person and I live my life in such and such a way, and that’s non-negotiable”? The moment we do that, we destroy the indeterminacy, we destroy the essence of reality. We lose touch with true reality.
We believe that spiritual development is supposed to happen according to what our old knowledge says is good for us, instead of recognizing that spiritual work means looking at the old knowledge and recognizing it as just ideas, concepts, and beliefs from the past. In some fundamental way, you don’t know at all what is happening right now. You don’t know what is going to happen. And the purpose of spiritual work is to pop those old beliefs and concepts, one after the other, until you realize that you do not know what is really happening. Every time you pop one, this is called having an insight. Normally you try right away to fit your insights into the framework of the old knowledge. But these insights are actually puncturing your familiar experience of the world. And in time, you start realizing, “Wait a minute! I am having all these insights, and they are punching holes in my world.” You are feeling a loss of support, and at a certain point things might open up in you and you feel, “I am going to fall forever!” But where you are falling is within your own mind. And if the insights are fundamental enough, you might fall out of your old mind!
We lose touch with the mystery if we go about our lives believing that we know all these manifestations that appear to us. You look at a person and say, “Yes, I see; she is made out of skin, nose, eyes, colors…” Everything is known. Door closed. No investigation, no inquiry, no mystery, no wonder. After a while, you get bored. If you look at reality this way, you are shutting away the mystery and destroying the freshness that is possible in experience. It might feel secure for a while, but it really isn’t. Many kinds of situations and experiences—the most important of which is death—show us that this view of reality does not keep us safe or secure. One day you might be confronted by this event we call death, and it will make you wonder, “Uh-oh, what is all this? Do I really know what life is about?” When the time comes, you may only have ten minutes to find out. This is one reason why I sometimes say that the Work is partly a preparation for death.
If I believe I am a deficient person, I keep seeing myself as deficient over and over again, and somehow life and the universe always seems to manifest me as a deficient person. In reality, there is no such thing in the universe as a deficient person. That concept is nothing but a certain boundary set on the manifestation of Being by a particular piece of information that I accept as true knowledge. I take this constraint on my experience to be what I know about myself—I say it is reality—because years ago I experienced myself this way and this impression became stuck in me as a certain boundary, an outline for the manifestation of my being.
Inquiry And Not-Knowing
Not-knowing is the door to the true, direct, fresh knowing.
To inquire into basic knowledge, we must respect and appreciate not-knowing. We need to become comfortable with not-knowing, we have to embrace not-knowing—not as a deficiency or lack, but as the manifestation of basic knowingness.
Not-knowing, regardless of how uncomfortable it is, is the starting point of inquiry. And to recognize that you don’t know is a very deep thing, as we will see. When we say we don’t know, we are usually looking at the situation from the perspective of ordinary knowledge. It is like saying, “I’ve studied chemistry; I studied the acids, the bases. But I haven’t studied organic chemistry, so I don’t know about organic molecules. I need to explore those so that my knowledge will be more complete.” This is how we ordinarily think about not-knowing; it is not-knowing from the perspective of ordinary knowledge. But there is a much more profound not-knowing, a much more basic not-knowing that underlies all of our knowingness, all of our knowledge. As you listen to me, you believe that you know me in a certain way. But most of what you know about me comes from experiences in the past. At this moment, if you really investigate, you will discover that you don’t really know me. Maybe I have changed since last night. How do you know? Maybe I went through a deep metamorphosis. Maybe I am not what I was yesterday or a few years ago. There is a basic not-knowing that is present all the time, in a fundamental and simple way. You look around you and say, “I’m sitting here with these people, inside these walls,” and you think you know who the people are and what the walls are. This is ordinary knowledge. And this ordinary knowledge from the past is actually determining your perceptions right now. In reality, you don’t truly know in this moment what a wall is. You call it a wall because you know things about walls, and you put the wall in a certain category that fixes and rigidifies it. Of course, it appears to be a normal wall. But what you are knowing is basically your mind. More precisely, you are knowing this presentation, which we call a wall, through the filter of your mind. But do you really know the wall at this moment? Do you truly know what this thing is in itself, without your ideas about it? You don’t know what’s here directly and fundamentally. You will not know unless you divest yourself of all your ideas about walls and people completely and look totally openly to see what you find. Then what you can experience is a basic, direct knowingness. But that can start only from a not-knowing. And you cannot take even this fresh, basic knowing into the next moment. In the next moment, you might need to penetrate even deeper to experience directly what is in front of you.
certain beliefs and ideas we already have, which we imperceptibly impose on our perceptive apparatus. We look through those ideas and see things in certain forms, certain colors, certain appearances. Our perception is not pure and naked.
This is a not-knowing that can begin inquiry. The more you are aware of what happened—“I just went through this door and saw all these people, and I am scared and frustrated”—and realize you don’t know why, the more likely it is that inquiry will begin. Of course, right away you may find a reason to explain your feeling: “Well, I am just scared of crowds. Too many people here.” This is a piece of knowledge derived from previous insights, but you can use it to close down the not-knowing. Maybe there is more to it. If you investigate, you might realize that you are not scared of crowds; you might discover that the reason why you are afraid is a deeper one. For example, you might be concerned about losing yourself in such a situation. It is important that we explore more thoroughly this not-knowing. We usually think that not-knowing is a gap, a deficiency, in our ordinary knowledge. That is why we judge ourselves, that is why we feel bad or get threatened and scared when we realize that we don’t know something. We think it’s something we could have known, and that if we know it now, the not-knowing will disappear. This position implies that we do not understand that not-knowing is how basic knowledge first reveals itself, that not-knowing is really a knowingness. Not-knowing already implies knowing, doesn’t it? You know that you don’t know. In the very not-knowing, basic knowledge is functioning. In other words, one of the main ways basic knowingness functions is in the feeling that you don’t know.
In fact, our basic knowing capacity begins by not-knowing. How can you know if you don’t first not know? We tend to be scared of not-knowing; we are unable to see that it is the pervasive ground of our knowledge. Not-knowing, in some sense, is where we live all the time. Every piece of knowledge is situated in not-knowing. It is the space where all knowledge is. So we can say that basic knowingness is the field of not-knowing, which can manifest forms within itself that this knowingness recognizes.
Ordinary not-knowing is the absence of certain information. Basic not-knowing is a quality of experience, an omnipresent quality necessary for our knowingness. It implies knowingness and it is the entry into knowingness. Basic not-knowing is actually the openness of Being that allows the dynamism of Being to disclose new possibilities of experience and perception.
Recognizing Openness In Inquiry
The more we think we know what is going on, the less open we are to find out; the more we acknowledge that we don’t know, the more open we are to discover what’s there. This means a greater possibility for inquiry, and a more effective inquiry.
The moment you feel, “Oh, this I know,” inquiry in that direction stops. It’s a dead end. However, when you feel, “Oh, I don’t know this,” inquiry moves in that direction. So we can say that not-knowing is a knowingness necessary for inquiry.
In inquiry, there is an interplay between knowing and not-knowing, but the ground is not-knowing. This ground of not-knowing is what expresses the necessary openness.
Practice Session: Your Experience of Not-Knowing A good place to start exploring your own experience in inquiry is by looking at your relationship to the experience of not-knowing. Under what circumstances do you avoid not-knowing? When do you tend to welcome it? Do you have associations with or judgments about your own not-knowing? Think of something specific in your experience that you would like to explore. Make a list of everything you think you know about it. Then list everything you don’t know about it. What is your relationship to knowing and not-knowing in connection with the issue you have raised? Notice what happens when a sense of knowing or not-knowing arises as you are inquiring. When does the inquiry seem to open up? When does it become narrower or start to close down?
Not-Knowing As Mystery
Every insight you arrive at is a burst of luminosity, but surrounding that insight is a sea of mystery. This sea of mystery is fundamental for the arising of the insight; without it there will be no space for this burst of luminosity. At the same time, this luminosity is an expression of the mystery and helps us to approach this mystery. In contrast, when we live in the realm of ordinary knowledge, our mind is thick with knowledge. Knowing is all around us, in the form of things we know—rocks, people, likes and dislikes, colors, feelings, memories. Everywhere we turn, there is only old knowledge, no mystery—except in mystery stories.
Knowing is a transitory phenomenon. Something arises and you know it; the experience of knowing it at that moment is what matters. What is important for your liberation is not that you’ve just gotten a piece of knowledge, which you then store in your brain in order to increase the amount of knowledge you have. What matters is the direct experience of the luminosity. And this direct experience of the luminosity needs and requires the ground of not-knowing. Ordinary knowledge can be used to either support inquiry or block it. For instance, if you know about resistance, you may recognize that your response to a certain experience is resistance, which then will help you to inquire. If you don’t know about resistance, you will not know how to inquire into your response effectively. However, if you always interpret your response to be resistance, that can block your inquiry. Even though the manifestation you are taking to be resistance is most often resistance, to always assume that it is resistance will prevent you from seeing that it could be something new. For example, let’s say you feel something hard in your head. You know well that you feel tension, so you conclude that this means that some sort of defense is operating. You investigate and try to open that up. Once in a while, though, that hardness might turn out to be an essential presence that is as hard as a diamond. So thinking that hardness in your head is always resistance—which is a piece of knowledge—might distort your inquiry. Even if the hardness is an essential diamond that is pushing through, you would probably want to push against it, and then it would feel even harder. That is why I sometimes ask a student, “What happens if you don’t fight the hardness?” Sometimes the
response is, “Oh, it starts shining!” If you always take the hardness as resistance, you close yourself off from the possibility of experiencing the shining; yet knowing that resistance appears as hardness is definitely a very useful knowledge.
The moment we rest, having concluded that what we know about something is final, we close the door to knowledge and we inhibit Being from disclosing its further and infinite possibilities. We lose the sense of adventure in our experience.
What does “mystery” mean? When you say, “There is mystery” or “I experience mystery,” you are experiencing not-knowing in a palpable form.
The not-knowing of inquiry is like a spring bubbling up in the stream of knowing from the underlying ground of Being’s mystery, indicating the undiscovered treasure that lies beneath.
Dynamic Questioning
Not-knowing on its own, however, does not initiate inquiry, even though it is necessary. Not-knowing is a passive condition, whereas inquiry is a dynamic engagement. For inquiry to start, not-knowing must become dynamic, active, and engaged. Many people can recognize they do not know something about themselves, but they do not go further; they leave it at that.
Dynamic Unknowingness
It is an unknowingness that wants to know, that loves to know. In a very direct way, dynamic unknowingness is the expression of dynamic knowingness.
What I am saying is that a dynamic not-knowing is one that is open to knowledge. It is not just a passive attitude that leaves things as unknown. It is a not-knowing that is full of interest, passionate about knowing, in love with discovery—a not-knowing that points to the possibility of further knowing. In terms of basic knowledge, this possibility leads to further discovery, further experience, further expansion.
We can say, then, that inquiry is a questioning whose dynamic essence is a knowingness that knows it does not know but is interested to know. And since it knows what it does not know, this knowingness knows where to direct its openness. It can direct its openness by knowing where the gap in knowledge exists. In other words, a question is really an elegant and beautiful embodiment of the dynamic unknowing of Being as it optimizes itself. It expresses basic knowingness by embodying at its heart this dynamic unknowing.
The Optimizing Force Of Being
The optimizing force of Being’s dynamism is a will and movement within the manifestation of Being that guides the dynamism to move toward more openness, greater illumination, greater maximization of reality, awareness, light, and truth. This is exactly identical to the core of a question, which means that the dynamism of Being can and does operate as the dynamic essence of a question. That is why we have often said that inquiry activates and engages the optimizing force of Being’s dynamism. Inquiry engages the optimizing force because the essence of a question is this unknowingness that is full of love for knowing.
What happens when you inquire into your experience? You notice that after a while, certain things begin changing, moving, and manifesting the various feeling states, beliefs, and associations involved in your experience. These arise as you question your experience. Do you ever wonder why? What is it about questions that does that? A question is really the functioning of both the dynamism and the optimizing force of the dynamism. When we inquire, Being’s dynamism moves toward expansion, toward light, toward understanding, toward truth. We experience this in the process of questioning. Or we can say that the openness toward the expansion and understanding is manifested through a question, for a question allows the possibility or the space for Being to manifest, to display whatever it is that we call an answer.
So the openness, the unknowingness, the investigating, can be expressed with words, but the questioning itself doesn’t have to have words; the dynamic unknowingness is the questioning itself. And you will find that sometimes your question doesn’t have words, it has only this dynamic unknowingness. But since you are investigating something in particular, you build on that wordless unknowingness by formulating words and concepts and bringing in what you know from the past. But the force itself, the current that moves, is a dynamic unknowingness, which is an expression of our Being.
Practice Session: What Limits and Stops Your Questioning
A good place to start this exploration is to find out what stops you from asking questions and what limits the questions you do ask. Many kinds of limitations exist in questioning. You may limit where you let your questions take you, for example, or perhaps how intensely you can ask a question. Why do your questions stay in one area instead of expanding into others? Why do you ask little questions instead of big questions, or complex questions and not simple ones? Some people don’t ask questions when they are stuck, others don’t ask questions when they are feeling good. So there are obviously many individual differences in how and when questioning occurs. Choose an issue that you would like to inquire into further than you may have in the past. Notice your mood right at this moment, and your initial attitude toward questioning in this area. Do you feel excited? Wary? Curious? Impatient? Confident? Tense? How do your feelings affect your approach to questioning? After you have asked the questions that seem relevant and allowed them to trigger other questions, step back and notice: What was the movement and nature of your questioning? Did you begin in one area and move into another, or several others? Was your questioning passionate? Distant? Persistent? Did you get stopped by a thought, a belief, or a position that blocked you from freely continuing? Did your mood shift during the process, and how did that affect your questioning? Observe as much as you can about the pathways your questioning took, and what that might mean about your attitude toward asking questions.
Liberating Questions
For some people, one of the major obstacles to questions results from secrecy in childhood. If you had to keep your own feelings secret or protect the secrecy of others, it would have been very difficult to ask questions. So you may have developed a great deal of anxiety about asking questions or an expectation of severe punishment for wanting explanations. Parental attitudes toward sexual curiosity in childhood also affect questioning. Children have a lot of sexual curiosity, and an unsupportive environment could put a damper on the questioning mind. Questioning needs to become multidirectional and open ended, with no limitations, no boundaries, no constraints. You need to develop the capacity and the willingness to ask any question, about anything, anything that is germane to your experience. For we’re talking here about questioning the important, fundamental things about life, about your life. Working on questions and liberating them is very difficult, but it is important if we want to inquire effectively and powerfully.
That’s why a good teacher is somebody who knows, but knows that she or he does not know everything. A teacher who knows everything is dull, can’t be spontaneous, can’t be creative. If you already know, you will just be saying what you know from memory; you might just as well write one book that contains everything you know and leave teaching to somebody else.
Being A Burning Question
The soul can always be ready to inquire, to know and discriminate what arises. You can be a question mark, an excited, exciting question mark that is constantly throbbing. You want to know and you are interested to know completely and fully. You don’t stop at “Oh, I’m feeling good today.” It’s fine that you know something about what you’re feeling, but that is not the end. So I ask, “What do you mean? What kind of feeling
good?” “I feel full in my stomach.” “Oh, good, now we’re getting someplace. What kind of full in your stomach?” “It feels something like milk in my stomach.” “Oh, did you have milk this morning?” “No.” “Well, then, what do you mean, milk in your stomach?” “That’s interesting! It seems like milk, it even looks white like milk. It tastes like milk.” So you begin with feeling good, but end up discovering that Essence can arise in the aspect of Nourishment, which is like physical milk. Through inquiry, knowledge deepens and expands, increasing your understanding. That’s what we mean by discrimination: More precision means more revelation. If you say, “Oh, I’m feeling good today” and you leave it at that, then when you feel depressed the next day, you won’t know what happened. There will be no revelation, no dynamism. The inquiry brings in greater discrimination, which helps you see exactly what is. Awareness expands, becomes brilliant, and the dynamism is engaged.
A question arises because at any moment our experience is not completely illuminated. If it were, we would be in total, objective reality. For us, there is always some dullness here and there, which means we don’t understand something, we haven’t penetrated it; the discrimination is not complete. So a question arises in response to the recognition that there is something we don’t understand.
Dynamic Openness And Wonder
It is a dynamic openness, an openness that has the potential to unfold, to open up to new possibilities. It is not just space, it is a fertile space, and the fact that it is a space allows manifestations to emerge within it. It is a space that has the potential for creation, for creating content within it.
Let’s go back to the example we discussed earlier. You arrive here and you are scared about walking into this room. You can look into this feeling of being scared, but your inquiry needs to also involve your attitude toward the fear. If, for example, you have the judgment that it is better not to feel fear, this is a bias that mitigates against openly inquiring into the fear. The inquiry needs to always be aware, in a questioning way, of where you are coming from.
Inquiry is something that arises in the midst of your experience—as part of your experience, not separate from it. In other words, there is not a person here inquiring into something over there. The inquirer has to be within the field of inquiry itself. This is different from inquiry in natural science, where the object of inquiry is outside you and all that is needed is to not interfere with it. In fact, as it has been stated in the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, even in physical science we cannot separate ourselves totally from the object of our inquiry. In our work, however, since you are inquiring into your consciousness, to make that separation will effectively stop the inquiry. When you are inquiring into yourself, the soul is a field of inquiry that is alive and active, where the inquirer, the inquiry, and the object of inquiry are the same field. The point is that when we inquire into something, we also always inquire—though not necessarily in an explicit manner—into our positions and biases, judgments and assumptions, identifications and reactions, into all that might limit our openness. This will expand the openness at the heart of our questions. If you don’t understand this, you can’t truly engage in an effective inquiry. The dynamic openness implies a lovingness that expresses our love of discovery, our love to know the truth, our love of the mystery. This makes it possible to behold all of our experience—in any moment—with wonderment. When we are aware of this lovingness implicit in the openness, then we are coming not only from a place of being open but a place of wonder. You do not ask questions only to find an answer;
you ask because you are full of wonder. This becomes more obvious the more comfortable we are with not-knowing. What kills the wonder is asking questions only in a utilitarian way, to get something out of the answer. Such an approach makes it necessary to find the right answer. But in inquiry, it is not important to be right. We do not ask questions to find the right answer; what is important is that there be an unfoldment, an illumination, an openness that is fertile, that keeps opening up,…
It is important, of course, to value your perceptions and insights, but the point is not to find an answer, which is a destination. It is to keep things rolling, so that the flow continues and the natural dynamism is liberated. Never forget that what matters is the movement, the expansion, the freedom—not which bit of information you have arrived at. Our inquiry is then filled with wonderment, which is the integration of the love of truth with the openness that arises as unknowingness. We find that the inquiry, and all of our experience, embodies an appreciative quality, a heart quality. Sweetness and appreciation pervade the openness. Wonder can become the source from which questions arise. It becomes the heartfelt dynamic essence of inquiry. If we let our questions arise from this true wonder, they will open to further questions, which in time become…
Direct…
If we are interested in understanding our experience, we cannot depend on abstract ideas and thoughts to guide our inquiry and our questions. Sometimes people sit around a table and ask all kinds of questions based on an argument or abstract thinking. That becomes sophistry. You can do that, but that is not the Diamond Approach. It is important that you inquire specifically into what is significant in your experience. What is significant in your experience is what presents itself and impacts you, and you can see this only if you are aware of your experience. If you are only thinking about your experience, or somebody has given you some ideas about…
This brings in the elements of mindfulness and concentration as described in chapter 4. Let’s look at an example of direct observation: I am sitting here and I recognize that there is a tickle in my belly that seems to be out of the ordinary, for my belly doesn’t usually tickle like that. I can inquire directly into this. I do not need to check any book; I can just apply my mindfulness and concentration with a questioning mind. The tickle can be the tip of an iceberg. Many other things might be happening in my belly: The tickle might turn out to be the tip of something that extends all the way through my pelvis and down through my legs. If I use my concentration and am not dissuaded by all my ideas, reactions, and superego, if I stick with my experience and my attention is not deviated, my mindfulness might inform me that the phenomenon doesn’t stop at my feet. In my seeing that, another layer of unknowingness has arrived. What is this tickle that begins in the belly but doesn’t stop at my feet? This is an example of an inquiry based on direct observation, which also includes a dynamic openness. It demonstrates the usefulness of developing mindfulness and concentration as supports for the direct observation necessary for inquiry. In using these capacities, I recognize that there is something there I don’t know, and I am interested to find out what it is.
final. A piece of information is one bit stored in the mental computer. When a piece of knowledge is needed, it is reproduced exactly as it was stored, without the possibility of modification. So we tend to take the content of our knowledge as final and absolute, and our memory becomes a boundary for what is possible in experience. One element that characterizes the Diamond Approach is the way we use ordinary knowledge. Many spiritual approaches say to drop your mind, throw away your knowledge, just be in a mindless space. You can do this, but that is not inquiry; it is something else. In the Diamond Approach, we use our ordinary knowledge in a specific way, an intelligent way. We use ordinary knowledge—all our concepts, ideas, realizations, and memories—as pointers to something in reality without taking the position that that knowledge is final and unquestionable. If we don’t do that, it will be the end of our inquiry. After a while, we won’t find anything vital inside the wrappings; nothing alive will remain within the concepts. Then we only live within wrappings, within shells of reality. We have all these packages all around us and we call it experience, and our living knowledge self-destructs.
Suppose that you had an experience that propelled you for the first time to work on the issue of doubt. Inquiring into the doubt led you to experience a wonderful black peacefulness. Having had that experience, you now know that the Black aspect of Essence is peace. (See chapter 16 for further discussion of the essential aspects and their colors.) This is stored in your memory as ordinary knowledge. The next time Black Essence arises in your experience, your mind remembers peace, so Black always becomes experienced as peace. If you remain fixed on the knowledge derived from this experience, you will never discover qualities about Black Essence other than peace. It is true that in your first encounters with it, the Black Essence arises mostly as peace, but when you further investigate this peace, you might recognize that the peacefulness is related to an exquisite, calm stillness. When you experience this stillness, you may think of it as peacefulness, but the concept of peacefulness doesn’t exactly capture the flavor of the experience. Stillness as the direct inner experience of the Black Essence is slightly, subtly different from peacefulness. And when you contemplate the stillness and explore it, you might find out that stillness is not static. This is difficult for the mind to grasp. Usually you think that stillness means stillness—nothing moving—which your mind understands as static, so that is generally how it is remembered when the experience of stillness is stored in your mind. Now when Black returns and you bring back the remembered experience, which has become a concept of stillness, you don’t recognize that stillness has a dynamic effect; you think of it as static and unchanging. In actuality, there is nothing static about the Black Essence. The dynamic effect—which is felt at the moment stillness comes in contact with the mind—is to erase the mind.
When you recognize this annihilating action of the Black Essence, you can begin to understand the relationship between peace, stillness, and annihilation. And if you stay open, without allowing the concepts of annihilation, stillness, or peacefulness to limit your contact with what you are experiencing, you might recognize that the Black Essence is also powerful, for it can quiet down the agitation of the mind easily and effortlessly. This might allow the Black Essence to arise as power, and you can then recognize that Black is the essence of power. Now we have gone from peace to power, though we wouldn’t initially have seen any connection between them. If we had remained bound to the memory of our original experience of Black as peace—filed it away in our computer as a bit of final knowledge and closed our mind to further possibilities—we might never have arrived at real power. But even power is not necessarily the end, because if you stay with your experience in an attitude of dynamic openness, the Black…
Organic, Free Intelligence
The intelligence I am referring to is inherent in our Being, a specific aspect of Essence that characterizes the optimizing force of Being’s dynamism. This optimizing force is movement toward greater and greater illumination. Illumination, when it becomes intense, is brilliance. Brilliancy is intelligence.
Practice Session: Your Experience of Questioning Now would be a good time to explore your own experience of questioning. What are the strengths and weaknesses of your questioning capacity? Explore this through an inquiry into a specific matter that you are seeking to understand more fully. Begin by asking questions about what you don’t know, what you would like to know, what puzzles you, or what interests you. Write the questions down as they come to you. Pursue your inquiry as it unfolds from the questions. See where the questions lead you. What answers arise? How are new questions stimulated? Where do you hit a dead end? Stay with this process for twenty minutes to half an hour. Then look at your list of questions and examine them in terms of the four factors described above: dynamic openness, intelligence, ordinary knowledge, and direct observation. How did these factors come into play in your immediate investigation? As you consider these different factors, did you notice any feelings or beliefs that restrict your ability to deeply inquire into your experience?
Questions and Answers STUDENT: I was struck by my experience that when all four of these elements are present, it means the loss of identity, of the sense of who I am. ALMAAS: It’s good that you brought that out, because this has been happening since yesterday. People’s identities are screaming. The not-knowing challenges the identity because the most important thing for everybody to know is who they are. If you don’t know, you wonder, “What is happening to me?” That is definitely challenging.
ALMAAS: The ego identity is a fake dynamism; it is always running around, always burning rubber. In contrast to this agitation and busyness, the true dynamism of Being may…
STUDENT: Isn’t basic trust necessary to allow that unknowing and the loss of identity? ALMAAS: By basic trust, you mean the experience of implicit faith in the optimizing force of the dynamism of Being—that if the unfoldment of experience is allowed, what happens will turn out for the best. This sense of trust is inherent in our natural connection to Being and the universe, but for most of us that connection is lost in childhood. And you are right that basic trust, and the sense of holding that comes with it, is fundamental, as well as other elements that we haven’t discussed. All the aspects will ultimately be needed. Basic trust is related to the holy ideas, which form the view of reality that underlies this method. Thus the entire process of inquiry is supported by that view, and basic trust returns naturally as we come to know the holy ideas and understand the view…
STUDENT: So the more you develop basic trust, the more your inquiry develops. ALMAAS: Yes. In time, you develop basic trust and you learn to trust the dynamism of the inquiry. This will happen as a result of several things: First, clearly recognizing the optimizing force in the dynamism of your own unfolding; second, truly seeing that optimization is the nature of the dynamism; and third, having faith that the optimizing is occurring even when you can’t feel it in the moment. Then you are trusting the guidance and the unfoldment. Basic…
We can say that inquiry is mindfulness with a dynamism that is open to seeing what it does not know, plus concentration with an energy that loves to find out the truth that it does not know. Concentration is necessary for staying on track and not getting distracted by stimuli that aren’t relevant to the particular inquiry. Mindfulness provides the capacity to be aware of anything that emerges in experience, regardless of how minute or subtle. The global awareness of mindfulness reveals the patterns of unknowing in experience. And questioning directs consciousness to investigate the not-knowing. Inquiry, based on love and dynamic openness, is a journey of wonderment whose center is a question that embodies knowing and unknowing. That dynamic openness makes all our questions penetrating and encompassing, which activates the optimizing force of Being—in the form of the Diamond Guidance—so that it may reveal the hidden truth, the truth beyond the known. What is needed now is love of the truth for its own sake to give that questioning power and urgency, enough to carry our spacecruiser out of our earthbound orbit and into the depths of the mystery.
Loving the Truth
The Devotional Attitude
We want something for its own sake when we truly love it. There’s no other way to want something for its own sake. Conversely, when we appreciate something for its own sake, we call that love. So loving truth for its own sake brings the heart to a devotional attitude, an attitude of selfless affection and dedication. It is the heart’s openness, the heartfelt appreciation and longing, the gravitational pull that makes us want to see the truth, to be closer to the truth, to be intimate with it. The heart’s love of the truth is not a thought or an idea. It is not a matter of trying to live according to an ideal. It’s not a motive that comes from the mind. It is an impulse from the depth of the soul, a deeply felt motive from the heart. It is not that we think and deliberate and decide that truth is good for us, so we end up wanting it. Love of the truth is not utilitarian. The truth often ends up being utilitarian, but that is not what inspires the right attitude for the journey. The correct attitude is that of a lover who wants to be close to the beloved.
Of course, most of us have myriad motivations most of the time. This is normal when we’re not mature enough for our heart to be integrated. Having many motivations means our heart is divided. It loves many things. Yet if love of the truth for its own sake is not present, Diamond Guidance simply won’t show up. However, if you really love the truth for its own sake—even if you want to know it for only an instant—Guidance says, “I’ll show up. You’ll find me there at the launching pad.” Now, this can be a very tricky situation. You might say, “Oh, good! Tomorrow when I work on myself, I will want truth for its own sake.” Well, what’s motivating you when you’re feeling that way? If what’s motivating you is another goal—to use loving the truth as a new method for working on yourself—it won’t work; you won’t get the truth. The heart itself has to quicken. You have to feel that inner desire for the truth itself. When that almost magical turn in the heart occurs—when for an instant you forget all your concerns in the world and want to know the truth only out of love—the Guidance reveals itself and guides you to the truth.
Inquiry in the Diamond Approach is a concern of the heart, a particular orientation that goes counter to how we generally think and feel and organize our life. Our heart needs to be involved in a pure, selfless way. Selfless means that we don’t want anything for ourselves. We investigate because we are turned on to the truth. We inquire because we can’t help it, because we can’t help liking the truth. We inquire because we really want to find out. What we find out might be wonderful or beautiful, and it might be painful, scary, or difficult. We might even get burned in the process. But none of that matters to the lover. To desire truth for its own sake means that the inquiry is not for your benefit, it’s for the sake of the truth. Yet this is the way that your heart can find its most complete contentment. This is paradoxical because if you are really dedicated to the truth for its own sake without thinking of yourself, if you give yourself over to it, in time the truth will give you back a lot more than you give. The truth is not merely a matter of not lying; it is seeing what the truth is—the essential truth, the absolute truth, which finally reveals the real world. This has been called the Kingdom of Heaven. However, you cannot take the perspective of trying to get to the Kingdom of Heaven. You can’t say, “Well, I’m going to love truth because I know if I get to the truth, then I will feel wonderful.”
Our heart needs to be involved in a pure, selfless way. Selfless means that we don’t want anything for ourselves. We investigate because we are turned on to the truth. We inquire because we can’t help it, because we can’t help liking the truth. We inquire because we really want to find out. What we find out might be wonderful
or beautiful, and it might be painful, scary, or difficult. We might even get burned in the process. But none of that matters to the lover. To desire truth for its own sake means that the inquiry is not for your benefit, it’s for the sake of the truth. Yet this is the way that your heart can find its most complete contentment. This is paradoxical because if you are really dedicated to the truth for its own sake without thinking of yourself, if you give yourself over to it, in time the truth will give you back a lot more than you give. The truth is not merely a matter of not lying; it is seeing what the truth is—the essential truth, the absolute truth, which finally reveals the real world. This has been called the Kingdom of Heaven. However…
Practice Session: Your Motive for Self-Exploration You might at this point want to explore your motives for doing inner work. To do this, you need to have some sincere desire to discover the truth. Take some time to sit and explore the following questions: Why do you work on yourself? You have all kinds of motives. What are you hoping to achieve in the process? How much are you motivated by love—for yourself, the process, the insights? What are your other motives? Which motive tends to predominate? Have you experienced the selfless motive of loving truth…
Giving Up The…
As I’ve said, it is a law of Being that its Guidance manifests when we want to know the truth. This is not a moral injunction. It’s not…
In other words, the revelation of the Kingdom of Heaven is the action of the optimizing force of Being, and only the love of truth can invite and activate that force. The optimizing force guides experience toward greater optimization, which means contact with deeper levels of truth. So loving truth for its own…
To love truth for its own sake means that at some point you give yourself over to the truth. This, however, is not a consequence, not a matter of cause and effect. It’s not that you give yourself over to the truth and then the truth reveals itself. It’s not even that you give yourself up to the truth because you love the truth. Loving the truth is giving oneself up to the truth. To love the truth for its own sake means that in the very instant of loving the truth, your self-centeredness has vanished. This is very profound, yet it can be very, very subtle. It means that in the moment I’m exploring, in the moment I’m investigating, I am in an attitude of giving. I am in a non-self-centered attitude. All of my consciousness, all of my attention, is sacrificed for the truth. Even “sacrificed” isn’t correct—it’s more like, “Whatever needs to happen, I am willing to do it.” Frequently, that doesn’t mean sacrificing anything. It’s more that loving the truth for its own sake means an implicit readiness to let go, to give up the self. To give up the self means, “I am willing to not protect myself against the truth. I am willing to not defend or resist.” Most of the time, giving ourselves up to the truth means giving up our defenses, manipulations, positions, and strategies—all the…
Food For The…
Initially the truth might be a specific insight, some connection we make between various elements in our experience. But as the soul gives herself more to the truth, the truth becomes essential truth, and ultimately the absolute truth—the ultimate nature of…
finally behold the absolute truth and see its beauty and magnificence, we understand. We recognize it as the source of love. We love it because it’s lovable. We love it because we are loving our true self. We love it because it’s natural to love the truth. Not because it’s correct, ethical conduct, but because in some very deep place in us, the truth is the Beloved. But even in this place, the question of loving the truth for its own sake can get subtle and problematic. When we see the beauty and magnificence of our own Being, we love it—but how do we love it? When you truly love somebody, you want to do things for them. You’re willing to go through discomfort in your life, you’re willing to give your time, your attention, your energy, but not because you’re going to get something from it. You want to give because the heart is overflowing out of love. That’s what love means. It is the same thing with loving the truth. Loving truth for its own sake means that you want the truth to be as deep as possible, as complete as possible. That’s implicit in loving truth. If you love truth for its own sake and you start seeing the truth, and that truth is not complete—there’s still more that you don’t see—the love you have will impel you to go further, to see deeper, to experience more fully. So you’re not oriented toward an end result. You’re oriented…
No matter how you feel about it, at some point you must face the fact that the process of inquiry, of investigation, of understanding your experience, is a heart involvement. It is an affair of the heart that represents the spiritual dimension of your life. It is the lifeline of the soul. This means that regardless of what is happening in your life, there can be a thread of luminosity, sweetness, and intimacy running…
own sake and allow that love to deepen and develop, you begin to see that loving anything else takes away from love for the truth. When you love something else besides the truth, there will come a time in the journey of inquiry when you are going to be faced with a choice. More precisely, the more you experience the love for truth, the more you will recognize that this love…
At some point, that love of worldly things can become a barrier to loving the truth. This happens when you want to preserve your possession of or connection to the things of the world at the expense of recognizing the truth. That’s when you experience the truth and the objects of the world as competing for your love. You don’t have to go very far to see this conflict. When you’re a parent, for example, it is very difficult to see the truth about your relationship with your children because you are afraid the truth is going to disrupt that relationship. You’re afraid of losing what you have. So to love truth requires that you recognize that truth is your primary love—Love #1. In fact, the situation can go as far as truth becoming your only love. This is when love is most effective, most powerful for the journey. This is when the heart is fully cognizant of its Beloved. But that’s not easy, for the heart is normally divided. The heart has many love objects, many beloveds. It might be easy to see that some loves are not good for us, such as cigarettes, too much sugar, or violence. But we love many things that seem to be good for us, and this brings the subtlety of the situation to the
The love for these things can become a barrier, for it will compete for your heart, and your heart will not be completely united in its love for the truth. Part of it loves the truth, but another part loves this person, and some part loves that other person, and another part loves tennis. One part loves food, and another part loves to watch TV, and yet another part wants to spend hours and hours conversing with friends, and so on. As I said, there isn’t an inherent contradiction between these things and the truth. However, the experience of most people is that this situation does become problematic. It is the natural tendency that when you love something, you don’t want to lose it. You want to have it. You want to be close to it. You want to protect it. And quite frequently, this means protecting it from what the truth might reveal. Furthermore, loving other things in such a way that they become a competition for your love of the truth indicates that your love is not completely selfless. It is still self-centered love. You still want something from whatever it is you love in the world—the object, the person, or the situation. You don’t love food selflessly, do you? No one loves food selflessly. When you love food, you want to have it, fill your stomach with it. It is especially difficult to love other people selflessly. Even if you have some degree of selfless love for another person, ordinarily a large part of your love will be selfish. In fact, nowadays people think that selfish love is fine, that it is the right thing. The whole growth movement seems sometimes to be about that: “Don’t love somebody else selflessly. You have to be selfish, you have to take care of yourself. You have to assert yourself, claim your rights. If this person isn’t giving you this or that, you should ask for it, even demand it.” This indicates that our culture is becoming disoriented because we are forgetting what selfless love is. Most people think that selfless love means that you have to be selfsacrificing in a masochistic way, that you allow other people to walk all over you. But selfless love can be pure giving without a masochistic kind of sacrifice. Of course, this subtle point gets missed. It is missed because it is not easy to get to that place. It is very difficult to really love somebody or something selflessly. Most of the time, loving somebody or something becomes competition for our love of the truth.
The understanding that we need to love the truth and make it our dominant love—even our only love—lies behind the need for discipline, behind the view of renunciation, behind the view of detachment. When it is said, “Renounce the world, leave the world,” what does that mean? The idea is not that the world is bad. The point is that if you love it to the extent that you don’t want to see the truth, then the world becomes a barrier to the truth. You feel that the truth will threaten that love for the world, so some of the time you will choose the…
world. It only means that the world is your second choice. But this is very difficult because of our divided heart. The heart is not powerful enough, courageous enough, strong enough to go charging after the truth regardless of what happens. You feel that you’re going to be rejecting and ruthless if you do that. You’re always concerned about this, about that, about what’s going to happen tomorrow. What is this person going to think of me? What is going to happen to my…
But the Guidance can work most effectively when the love of truth outweighs our love for everything else. When does our love for the truth become the only love? When we recognize that there is nothing else but the truth. When our perception has opened up to the extent that we see an expression of the truth wherever we look, then we love only the truth. Then truth is not at all in contradiction to the other loves. We love everything. This is a beautiful condition to get to. We arrive there, however, only through first preferring the truth over everything else. Unless we truly perceive that everything is the truth, we cannot say, “Well, since everything is the truth, let me love it as much as the truth.” That won’t work. For us to say that everything is the truth, we must be actually perceiving for ourselves that this is the case. Before that, everything is not the truth, at least not as far as we are concerned. To say, “I love that,” about someone or something in your life without loving the truth in that moment indicates that what you are seeing is not true. You’re actually looking at falseness and that’s what you’re loving. In reality, there is no such thing as a person separate from the truth. So, if you love your husband, for instance, yet you are not loving him as a reflection of the truth, then what are you loving? Either your husband reflects the truth or you’re loving something that is false—some idea in your mind that is bound to take you away from the truth and be in competition with it. So loving the truth for its own sake confronts us at some point with a choice between truth and our other loves. There is no way around the step of preferring the truth over other things. If our heart is going to move toward what it really loves—the truth for its own sake—the heart will need to see that all these other loves are not as important as the truth. That has to happen if the…
orient your heart in the right direction. It’s a process through which love of the truth will eventually reveal…
Love And The…
The objects we crave compete for our attention, our interest, our time, and our commitment. This is because of what we call the libidinal soul, the primitive and animal level of our soul, the part that is run by instinctual drives. At some point, we recognize the libidinal soul as one of the main barriers to the love of truth. Love of truth is a subtle thing; it is the illumination, the radiance, and the melting sweetness of the heart. The animal soul, however, doesn’t love the truth. Not only that, it doesn’t even recognize love. This soul is dominated by cravings, by animal desires: “I want it because I gotta have it. What has love got to do with it?” This is just like when an animal feels, “I gotta have this meat.” It’s not out of appreciation or love. It’s more like, “If I don’t have it, I’m going to die.”
More than any other influence, they make us forget about or ignore the truth. You may see the truth, but when an instinctual need comes up, you not only stop seeing the truth, you actually feel, “Who cares about the truth? If following my instinct means that I’ll survive, and I don’t know if I’ll survive if I follow the truth, then the choice is obvious.” Survival is what you go for. You forget truth because it feels like a luxury. In fact, the animal soul doesn’t just forget truth; its attitude is, “What’s that? What’s truth? You can either eat it or you can’t. If I can’t put truth in my mouth, what good is it? If I can’t play with it, what is it for? If it’s not fun, if it’s not filling, if it doesn’t make me feel safe and secure, I’m not interested.” The animal soul manifests as many kinds of desires, cravings, and needs. Pleasure is paramount. Even when truth comes, it’s good only if it is pleasurable. If it feels sweet, nice, yummy, that’s good. If it’s bland or bitter, it’s not the truth that’s wanted. This level of soul exists in us all. At this level, it is not a question of having difficulty with the truth due to a divided heart. The animal soul does not have a heart yet! It’s operating on the lower chakras; only the stomach and pelvis matter here.
What’s important to see is that ultimately, all animal instincts amount to the basic drive for physical survival. And all our powerful needs and instinctual drives can become a force that completely eclipses the love of truth. This is true whether the survival instinct manifests as the need for security, support, safety, affection, social contact, comfort, or money. In reality, all social and sexual instincts are linked to survival. For example, you may just want somebody around or someone to talk to on the phone, and it doesn’t matter whether truth is involved. Just talking is what’s needed. What’s really happening is that you can’t be alone; you are operating unconsciously from the assumption that social contact is a survival need, and that takes precedence over the love of the truth. We need to deal with this level of our soul if we are to liberate our heart, for our heart can truly love only when it is…
So the level of the instincts, the animal level, looks at the world in terms of objects of gratification—going after things that will make us feel good, gratify us, and help us survive. These are real needs for human beings; they are not made up. We need food to survive. We need some kind of security. We need to have some pleasure; human beings can’t survive if all they are experiencing is pain and suffering. We need some kind of company, some kind of social contact, some kind of family. The question is not whether these things are needed, but whether the expression of these needs is more powerful than the love for the truth. When it is, we stay on the animal level. This doesn’t mean that anything bad is going to happen. It just means that we’re going to continue living as animal souls; we won’t take the next evolutionary step toward becoming truly human souls. Many people go into spiritual practice without dealing with their animal soul, without recognizing that there is such a thing. Some even become enlightened but never find out that they still have an animal soul. This means that the animal soul is living in the dungeon, waiting for a chance to come out. The moment the observer inside relaxes and a wonderful object of gratification appears on the horizon—perhaps an object more wonderful and available than ever before—that’s when the animal soul will come out.
The love of the truth is in some sense our beacon, our way to become more human, more developed, more refined. And this does not happen by abandoning our animal needs—you can’t abandon these needs—it happens by not putting them ahead of the truth. Practice Session: Your Instinctual Needs and Your Love of the Truth You might want to explore in yourself the relationship between your heart’s love for the truth and your animal instincts and needs, your libidinal soul. Make your inquiry specific: You want to see what your situation is right now. You want to arrive at the objective recognition of how much your love for the truth has developed in relation to the power of your instinctual needs. Bring to mind an issue that has pitted your love of truth against your instinctual needs. The areas of sexuality and power are usually fertile ground for this kind of exploration. As you inquire into this situation, notice what happens. Are you loving the truth for its own sake? What power do your instinctual needs have over you? You want to see where that dance happens, where the conflicts occur in this particular instance. Then you can return to a consideration of these conflicts in a more general context. Be willing to see the details and recognize which one wins most of the time. In what situations does the love of truth win out over your instinctual needs? When does the reverse happen?
Inquiring into and understanding the animal soul is a more effective way to work with our instincts than attempting to control them through renunciation. If you just renounce your cravings, your desires, your passions, then you’re not dealing with the animal soul. When you say, “I don’t want to engage with the animal soul. I’m not going to do anything to it, and I won’t allow it to do anything to me,” that pushes it to the side, and its tendencies are suppressed. But just as renunciation will not bring us to the place where our love of the truth is primary, neither will acceptance. Even after you recognize the unsatisfied needs and wants of the animal soul and how they were rejected—and then work with them and accept them—that does not necessarily translate into allowing the love of truth to dominate. The animal soul has its own fixations and objects of satisfaction. We definitely need to allow the animal soul to feel all its wants and desires and we need to accept them. However, that is not enough for the animal soul to be able to let go of them. It can still…
So both the rejection of and catering to animal desires are barriers to…
In reality, the animal soul is the primary barrier to spiritual development. It’s difficult for us to see this because we’re usually not dealing with a healthy animal soul; we’re dealing with a damaged, distorted, or arrested one. So we’re always dealing with the distortions. We don’t know how big a barrier the animal soul itself is because we’re busy trying to turn it into a more “normal” animal soul by freeing the instincts that were repressed in childhood. That in itself is not easy. But even if you can accomplish that, you recognize, “Oh, what did I do? I thought this animal was going to turn out nice and cute.” You didn’t know it was going to become a huge hungry monster that declares: “Good! Now I am strong, I have my energy. Now I can get what I want!” It’s not as if the animal soul never feels peace and happiness. It does—when it has gotten what it wants. The animal soul becomes beautiful and graceful—but only after gratification of its desires. There’s no freedom in this. You’re at the whim of your desires. In this way, the animal soul is like a small child. When things are going fine, the child is happy. He is an angel. When something goes wrong and he is not getting what he wants, or you want him to do something he doesn’t want to do, the child can become angry and even vicious. Give the animal soul what it wants and it becomes relaxed, happy, and generous. But the next day, when it is hungry again or somebody crosses its path, it behaves very differently. So there are two stages of working on the animal soul. First, allowing it, accepting it, and letting it be…
The Heart And The Higher…
If we’re closed—meaning that we are clinging to our positions, identifications, and structures—that situation will trap the energy of the dynamism, which will then move in circles. That is what happens in the experience of ego. We have fixed, rigid structures, and they need the dynamism in order to keep re-creating themselves.
This shows more specifically why it is the energy for the optimizing, energizing, evolutionary force. Love, by its very nature, is a matter of revelation, of unfoldment. It is a manifestation of Being whose very nature is a matter of opening up and unfolding, like the unfolding of a rose. Rumi once said in a poem, “This is love: to fly heavenward. To rend, every instant, a hundred veils.” To love is to rend the veils. What does it mean to rend the veils? To reveal. So love is Being in the process of revealing its truth. It is the dynamic, revealing energy of Being. This unveils two things about the engagement with the Diamond Guidance. First of all, the Diamond Guidance is the discriminating intelligence of the optimizing thrust, the guiding intelligence that specifically reveals through the recognition of what is being revealed. There is a dynamic interaction between this Guidance and love, an interaction related to the optimizing force of Being. Love is the energy of the dynamism that displays the truth, while Guidance is the magnifying lens of Being that helps us recognize what is being displayed. Furthermore, the Guidance is the discriminating intelligence that opens the way for love to display the truth. The two things need to happen together for there to be a revelation: Our spacecruiser needs a navigational system with its sensor array, and it also needs an energy source powerful enough to take us beyond the gravitational pull of our conventional experience.
You need both: the active force—the love itself—and the Guidance. The two working together is the alchemical combustion, the revelation.
The Quickening Of The Soul
Diamond Guidance always reveals something new. It discriminates the creative display of Being. That is why it is the nous, the higher intellect. The lower intellect is our usual discerning capacity, similar to that of a computer. It merely discriminates a different form of what it already knows. This activity is the repetition of the knowledge of the past, or of different combinations of things we’ve known from the past. It puts one thing and another thing together and, using reason, it comes up with an idea. But that idea can never be original.
The heart is love, and love means appreciating what is real. When I say that techniques or practices are not effective on their own to activate the unfolding, this applies equally to inquiry. Inquiry will not work if we don’t love the truth for its own sake. It just becomes an intellectual exercise. If we are disengaged from our heart, we might understand something but it won’t bring about the revelation or unfolding. Our experience won’t evolve.
It has been said that to look for the Absolute, you cannot look in any temple or place, but must look for it in your own heart.
There is an inherent reason why the heart loves the truth. More than any other expression or manifestation of the truth, the heart is designed so the truth can reveal itself there most fully. It’s just like when we make a ring for a particular stone. The ring is made for that stone to fit perfectly. That’s what the heart is—a particular setting for the precious stone that is the truth. This is a very subtle, deep perception that we can recognize at some point. We see its reflection when we feel that we love and want the truth. The heart loves to have its master present, longs for its true occupant to dwell within. Before that, the heart is occupied by many kinds of things that are mistaken images of what the truth is. All these things that we love and want do not fit the heart exactly.
Only that one thing will fit one hundred percent perfectly. The heart will know when the truth appears. It will then be fulfilled. And the Diamond Guidance is the specific…
HISTORICAL BARRIERS TO LOVING THE TRUTH The heart is the feeling capacity of the soul, the soul’s capacity to know intimately. In the process of developing love of truth for its own sake, we encounter various kinds of difficulties besides the ones we have discussed. Things happen in the heart that tend to close it down, things that make it difficult to open up to the truth, to feel the desire to see the truth. Because of our experiences in the past, we may have developed fear of the truth itself. For various reasons, we might become afraid of recognizing the truth. For instance, as the heart begins to love the truth, and the…
These are places that were shut down, isolated, or suppressed at times when the truth was painful or difficult. There were times when we felt rejected as little kids, or not loved, or punished, or abused. That was part of the truth of the situation. At those times, it was too much for the young soul to take, so the heart closed down in order not to feel the pain, the hurt, and the fear. This will manifest at some point as a limitation in our love for the truth. So we don’t want our love for the truth to open fully because it will reveal the particular truth that we know unconsciously we’re unprepared for or are afraid of experiencing. That’s why the process of opening to truth is challenging—because it requires us to feel our various resistances. It is not only that we fear the truth due to pain and difficulties. Some of us might end up hating the truth. Because of the harm we have experienced—which we saw as the truth of the situation—we might feel, “What do you mean, love the truth? That painful family situation I grew up in was the truth, and look what it did to me! I hate the truth!” Others might end up distrusting the truth. As children, we were innocent and frequently spoke the truth, yet sometimes we got punished for it. The result was that we felt we lost something important to us, such as our parents’ love, so we don’t trust the truth to support us. Other early experiences may result in the belief that the truth is going to be our enemy. This might be true for children who tend to lie to get what they want or to get away with things. For them, the truth may feel like an entity they are at war with, like it is siding with their parents or with bad luck or deprivation. Sometimes they end up lying so much that they actually forget what the truth is. Children are naturally truthful, vulnerable, and curious. So if they are exploited or misunderstood, disappointment in the truth can easily arise. Loving truth for its own sake is bound to not only confront this barrier of the painful truths of the past, but also confront us with the threatening truths of the present. We might not want to be aware of the truth in a certain situation. We may prefer to deny it. The cause of this particular barrier is that we as children were unable to discern the whole truth of our situation. The feeling of being disappointed by the truth is not actually caused by an…
Guidance never reveals things to us that we don’t need. The revelation of truth is what Being presents in our experience, and Being is intelligent, compassionate, and loving. It will present exactly what is needed in the moment. That is why inquiry is generally a much safer approach than many other methods we can use. It follows what arises, it does not push, because it is not trying to get somewhere or achieve some goal. Practice Session: The History of Your Love of the Truth Now is a good time to explore your love of the truth in terms of how it developed. You want to see specifically how your history affected your love of the truth. What kinds of experiences around truth did you have as a child? Did they open your heart to the love of the truth and allow that part of you to grow and develop? Or was your history such that you ended up distrusting…
Love Versus…
So to love truth for its own sake also implies a transformation of our experience and perception. This fact will present us with a specific obstacle that we have not discussed so far. The barrier I am referring to is a particularly tough one: the fact that our sense of self in the ordinary world has a component or characteristic that resists such transformation. Our sense of self is based on fixed structures. In fact, that sense of self is itself a fixed structure. So our feeling of identity is ordinarily unchanging. Our sense of who we are has a conditioned quality to it, which means that we have a habitual tendency to experience things in a certain way, to think of things a certain way, to know and do things in a certain way…
This rigidity of the ego-self, its inflexibility, can be experienced as inertia: the habit of going on and on in the same way, in the same direction, without change. Our perception, experience, and identity contain this inertia. Inertia can also be expressed as an automatic tendency to continue with and live out the status quo. The personality becomes part of the status quo; consequently, its way of perceiving, being, and operating can’t help but perpetuate the way things have been. This means staying at the same level of experience, the same level of discourse, having the same patterns and the same identity, and being the same kind of person year in and year out. This can manifest in specific and clear ways, such as the inflexible tendencies that are hard for us to break even when we want to. We might be always busy, always afraid, always angry. We might habitually watch TV. We might habitually spend time in social conversation or gossiping. Even though we want to change those behaviors, it might be difficult due to the inertia of the personality. To love the truth for its own sake means that we’re going to be happy to see something new in our experience. Our inertia, our inflexibility, on the other hand, operates in just the opposite way. It resists change and thus becomes a limitation on our love for the truth. It is obvious how this works, but we need to see it in our personal everyday experience. We need to recognize how our inertia—our habits, our lazy comfort in the status quo—inhibits, limits, and even blocks our love for the truth. The truth, in contrast, is a quickening, a movement, a change. One specific form that inertia takes is identification. The more we are identified with a particular position, the more unwilling we are to move from it. If I am angry, that’s it—I want to be angry. I am identified with that emotion and feel justified in it. This means that I am not interested in finding out about the anger and its underlying dynamics. Another example is being identified with a certain self-image. If I am a certain way and I am identified with it, I believe it is me and I am not open to exploring it. So the identification blocks the heart movement, the love of the truth that would allow me to find out what is really there. One particular identification is especially challenged by the love of the truth: our identification with being small,…
We need to recognize how our inertia—our habits, our lazy comfort in the status quo—inhibits, limits, and even blocks our love for the truth. The truth, in contrast, is a quickening, a movement, a change. One specific form that inertia takes is identification. The more we are identified with a particular position, the more unwilling we are to move from it. If I am angry, that’s it—I want to be angry. I am identified with that emotion and feel justified in it. This means that I am not interested in finding out about the anger and its underlying dynamics. Another example is being identified with a certain self-image. If I am a certain way and I am identified with it, I believe it is me and I am not open to exploring it. So the identification blocks the heart movement, the love of the truth that would allow me to find out what is really there. One particular identification is especially challenged by the love of the truth: our identification with being small, deficient, inadequate, incapable, and not up to the task. This belief in our deficiency can prevent us from opening to the love of truth because this love will expand us in a way that we’re afraid we won’t know how to handle. It seems much easier to stay with the status quo and its cozy familiarity. If we allow the love of truth to become powerful, we will be confronted with this identification with inadequacy. There are offshoots of all these obstacles, but it is enough to mention these as beginning points for your own continuing inquiry. The more you work on these obstacles, the more the space opens up and allows the love of the truth to manifest or to expand and deepen. The love of the truth is a subtle and refined quality in our consciousness. It tends to be hidden behind many veils of emotion, instinct, and…
The Personal…
AT THIS POINT HAVING activated our questioning engine and engaged our love of truth fuel on board Spacecruiser Inquiry, we shift from our power drive and again engage our hyperdrive to travel through hyperspace, the space of the second journey. To support our inquiry in the second journey, we will now explore what we call the Point Diamond dimension of Essence. This dimension is fundamental to the continuity of essential realization. It provides inquiry with a very important…
The Point Diamond…
The understanding that results will also challenge many ideas, positions, and beliefs that we may have adopted by listening to spiritual jargon. It will also set the work of…
Thus, the lifeline we are exploring is not only your location in time and space, but your location in terms of where you are in your experience; it is the lifeline of your soul’s unfoldment. You can always find yourself in a certain state, or experiential configuration, at any point of your unfoldment. Your soul’s phenomenological configuration in any moment corresponds to the location in the space dimension of Minkowski space, and the point where you are in your unfoldment corresponds to the location in the time dimension.
The band where the ego normally crystallizes is where the assemblage point is fixed. The teaching is to discover how to free yourself from this fixation—how to move your assemblage point without constraint—so that your perception becomes liberated, thus allowing you to roam through the experiential bands and be open to experiencing the totality of your potential. We can also call the Point Diamond realization the teaching of the personal thread, in the sense that your lifeline can be seen as the thread of your evolution, of your unfoldment. If you really investigate, inquire into, and understand your situation fully, you can find out at any moment where your thread is, which is where you are experientially.
The ability of your assemblage point to move freely is what allows your personal thread to be free from influence. Thus, this can also be seen as the teaching of freedom from influence. This teaching provides us with an understanding of influence and what it means to be free from its limitations. When you have this understanding, you are able to fully realize the uniqueness of your personal thread.
Dynamism And The Current Of Experience
In the second journey, we are engaging our hyperdrive, which is similar to Star Trek’s warp drive, the type of propulsion system that allows space vehicles to travel faster than the speed of light. What I have called the power drive is the equivalent of impulse power on a starship, used to travel at sublight speeds. Full impulse power is only one-fourth the speed of light. So when you are operating the warp drive, the laws of sublight physics don’t apply, and you find yourself traversing huge distances in extremely short periods of time. For example, even at warp factor 1, which is the slowest faster-than-light speed, you can reach the moon—400,000 miles from Earth—in 1.34 seconds. This can give you a sense of the speed of unfoldment that is possible on the second journey. You can find yourself accelerating so quickly that it seems as though you have instantaneously transported yourself to another place.
When we think only in terms of cause and effect, the dynamism, the intelligence, the power, the force, and the aliveness within our Being are all left out. We’re thinking only within a mechanical framework, holding a mechanistic view of how change happens. But human experience cannot be completely explained as a function of cause and effect or any other predictable construct about change. We can never systematize life changes completely, for we will always find exceptions. There will always come a time when things happen differently.
This is just a thought experiment to simplify the question, but it shows that without some kind of change either inside you or outside you, there will be no perception. Change is necessary for perception.
Perhaps you usually don’t think of it this way. You probably see your life from a physical perspective: There’s physical space, and you have a physical body, and that body goes around in this physical space and does things or doesn’t do things, makes noises, and so on. Maybe you also include your inner experience and external perception, but these you probably situate within this physical perspective. However, you can also look at your life and reality in general as a series of changes in perception, and this perception includes the body and its movements. We ordinarily think that perception and experience are secondary to the physical space and the physical body that’s in it, but can you ever experience the physical body in physical space without perception? Can there be any life at all without perception, and specifically, without changing perception? No. Therefore, we can say that one’s life is a current of experience, a current of perception, a current of impressions. Experience includes all the modalities: vision, hearing, feeling, sensing, thinking, imaging, all together as one unified current. If you close your eyes, the current continues; only the patterns and colors change. Certain things are not there, other things are there. Certain things appear, others have disappeared. You may say that you closed your eyes, which is the familiar way of expressing this experience, but what happens is that the current is presenting different perceptions. At least, this way of viewing it is just as valid as the notion that your eyes open and close. In fact, if you investigate it philosophically, or completely scientifically, you will find no proof that you have closed your eyes. All you can assert without further assumptions about reality is that impressions changed and perception changed, because the explanation that you closed your eyes is itself an impression that is part of the current.
What we don’t see is that everything that’s happening is simply a change in the stream of our perception. The continuity, the current, of experience is constant and includes everything—there’s really no inside or outside.
Optimizing The Unfoldment
Inquiry is basically a matter of participating in the stream, cooperating with the current, going with the flow, in such a way that you are aligning yourself with the optimizing force. In other words, inquiry is more than just a continuous movement with the current. In all experience, the current expresses the dynamism, but this dynamism may or may not be optimized. In inquiry, we are aligning ourselves with the optimizing force in the dynamism, which means that the current of experience
moves toward becoming brighter and clearer, more beautiful. This beauty and clarity can be conceptualized in many ways—as fulfillment, as heightened awareness, as depth, as expansion, or as more reality, more fullness, more objectivity. However you experience it, the optimizing current is further revealing the mystery of Being. As long as there is consciousness, the current is always there. Without optimization, it flows only on the surface of reality—moving in one or several directions, or circling back on itself. Even though there might be changes, the current stays on the same plane, repeating the same fundamental outlines of experience—as the surface itself is infinite. This is life when it is lived solely on the ego level. But the current can also flow deeper, which means that it begins to manifest the underlying potential of Being, revealing new and unexpected planes of experience. The current then becomes creative—not only in the sense of being generative, always producing, but in the artistic sense: Something new arises, something original manifests; an enhancement happens, an optimization.
This is the essence of the spiritual journey: As you move toward wholeness, you see more and more of reality, and more of your nature is accessible and expressed.
Moving Toward Wholeness
You might very well ask, “Well, if the movement is not going toward wholeness now, but it ultimately will, why not push it that way?” But are we as intelligent as Being itself, in its natural responsiveness? Do we know what the next step will be? Are we as omniscient as Being itself that we can determine how the current should go? How do we know that the way the current naturally is flowing when we are aligned with Being’s intelligence is not the most efficient route toward wholeness? So understanding the dynamics of Being reveals a trap that many people fall into: attempting to twist God’s arm or second-guessing Being, trying to help it along by pushing its current in a particular direction. This tendency to orient our experience toward a particular state reveals more than anything else the identifications and positions we have learned from various teachings. Most teachings actually say, “This is where you’re headed, so let’s go straight there.” This is especially a danger when we become attracted to teachings referred to as sudden, direct, or fast methods. Such approaches might seduce you into believing that you can jump into the final realization without going along with the dynamism itself. The possibility definitely exists that this jump will be successful, but it is a minuscule possibility, and whether it can happen depends on where you are in your journey.
Then you will develop a superego, or inner critic, that is always looking over your shoulder and telling you: “The goal is over there; how come you’re still here? When are you ever going to get there? You know you’re not doing very well.”
Practice Session: Your Personal Thread You might find it useful now to stop and explore for yourself what we have been discussing. Have you been in touch with a current in your inner experience? If so, what is your experience of this personal thread? To help you answer these questions, choose an issue that you have been aware of or working with for some time and begin to tune in to your feelings and
attitudes about it in this moment. What is your experience of yourself in relation to this issue now? Then look back at the time when the issue first arose for you. Can you identify a thread of experiences that has brought you to your present position in regard to this issue? Did you lose touch with that thread from time to time? Under what circumstances? How did you reconnect with it again? Looking in this way at your history around an issue can reveal how your process is more like a thread unraveling than a problem being solved. How do you know when you are in touch with the thread and when you aren’t? Looking at the overall process of working with your issue, can you see how the thread might be tracing an unfoldment in your soul? If so, how would you characterize that movement?
The Mandala Of The Soul
A useful image to help us conceptualize the thread of personal unfoldment is the mandala. By a mandala I mean a field with a midpoint, such as a sphere with a center. The field is the totality of your experience—your thoughts, feelings, sensations, perceptions, actions; it is the totality of your life at each moment. The center is where Being’s dynamism touches your field, touches your mandala. This is where the transformation of experience begins, which then ripples through the whole field. The center is where you are—the essential aspect or state in which your soul is manifesting, which is where you find your identity, your true nature. Being interacts with your mandala by touching you right at the center—in fact, the touch is what makes it your center—which has a rippling effect throughout the whole mandala.
The Personal Thread In The Three Journeys
In the first journey, your identity is on the ego level, which is the familiar sense of self-recognition. This identity is a reflection of the particular ego structure that defines you in relation to your experiential field. In the second journey, the identity is the Point, the point of light and existence, the Essential Identity. In the third journey, the identity is the mystery of Being itself, the Absolute. These differences create some variations in the nature of the thread in each journey.
This process is the same in all of the journeys. However, the thread in the first journey has no single element that consistently characterizes it. The thread can be: Now I’m angry… now nothing is happening… now I’m eating my dinner… now I am stuck. As a result, the thread in the first journey meanders over a large territory, without clear connections, though sometimes in hindsight you can see what they are. So even though you can find your thread, there is no inherent feeling of “Yes, here I am.” The moment you say, “Oh, here I am,” you are already in some sense entering the second journey, as you begin to recognize yourself independent of the content of any particular experience.
The whole thrust of the work on the first journey is to become aware of yourself to the point of knowing where you are at any given moment.
The Thread Of Essential Presence
The more aware you are of what’s going on—that is, the more you are in touch with and understand your personal thread—the more the optimizing force can impact your experience. This optimizing force always occurs when we align with any of the qualities—such as awareness, understanding, or in-touchness—that the optimizing intelligence naturally manifests when Being’s dynamism is allowed in our experience. We see this most easily in the second journey, which is the journey with presence. You are aware of your essential presence, but other things are also going on in your mandala. You may be experiencing a particular quality of presence, such as the Personal Essence or Peace or Compassion. This quality constitutes the center of the mandala, and the rest of the mandala is composed of your feelings, your memories, your internal dynamics, your actions—the whole emotional inner atmosphere and how it manifests in your life, as well as the entire perceptual sphere.
We see this most easily in the second journey, which is the journey with presence. You are aware of your essential presence, but other things are also going on in your mandala. You may be experiencing a particular quality of presence, such as the Personal Essence or Peace or Compassion. This quality constitutes the center of the mandala, and the rest of the mandala is composed of your feelings, your memories, your internal dynamics, your actions—the whole emotional inner atmosphere and how it manifests in your life, as well as the entire perceptual sphere.
This center is a changing point, and this point, as it changes, forms a thread—your essential lifeline. Thus, in this journey, the mandala is quite clear, and it is easy to see the thread.
Two elements are involved in this inquiry: first, seeing the center of the mandala, which means being aware of your presence and knowing exactly the quality of this presence; and second, being aware of and understanding the totality of the mandala, that is, the reverberations of the presence through the rest of your consciousness, and vice versa.
second, being aware of and understanding the totality of the mandala, that is, the reverberations of the presence through the rest of your consciousness, and vice versa.
Following The Thread
You see your issues in relationship to whatever essential quality is manifesting, and you also see and understand how your life experience is limiting or affecting the essential presence. The essential presence becomes the guidance. It is a thread of Essence continually becoming brighter, more luminous, and that thread of brightness can move through our experience. In contrast, there is no thread of brightness in the first journey. It just blips once in a while.
To recognize Essence as your center, you have to have some identification with essential presence; you have to have recognized, “Oh, that’s me.” This is the experience of the Point: Experiencing that you yourself are the purity of Being.
this is you if you have not worked on the Point and the narcissistic issues surrounding it.
Trying To Control The Thread
During the second journey, you need to trust that there is nothing to do but stay with the thread. The question of trust activates the specific issue that makes it difficult to stay with the thread. The specific issue of any essential aspect is the issue that arises in everyone regardless of personal history, as a barrier against realizing that aspect. The specific issue for the Point Diamond is the belief that you need to be someplace in particular. “Maybe I should be experiencing the mystery. I should be in the unchanging silence beyond all of appearance. That’s realization.” No! Realization is knowing where you truly are, not experiencing some state that you can only sometimes reach.
Dynamism has its own purposes in presenting itself within you the way it does. You can say, “No, that’s not what I want,” but this comes from a will disconnected from the Divine Will. Because of this self-centered willfulness, it is said in some of the theistic traditions that harmony with the Divine Will is a higher realization than Godrealization.
Our personal contribution is to investigate our experience to become aware of and understand what’s happening, because if we don’t understand it, we will tend to push against it. Not understanding it means that we are acting according to some other impulse that originates in a more superficial part of our soul. The movement of the whole mandala is then being directed by this superficial part, which most likely is a remnant of our personal history.
The quality of awareness, the quality of consciousness, the quality of responsiveness, the quality of contact and action—all these elements of experience are largely defined by our internal barriers.
Transforming The Mandala
Let’s look at an example of how the interaction between the center and the field of your mandala might occur. Suppose you’re experiencing the presence of Clear Essence. It is clarity and transparency, which teaches you that your nature is lucid and clear. You may begin then to see a thickness around your head. You can investigate this thickness much more effectively while the clarity is present because the clarity reveals the thickness, the obscurations, in contrast with its own clear nature. You start seeing the history of this thickness and what it is connected with—the object relations and their history—and at some point you realize that one object relation becomes more dominant. You realize that your clarity wasn’t seen, wasn’t recognized or appreciated by your parents when you were a small child. As you are dealing with the issue of your clarity not being recognized, you notice that your essential presence has changed from Clear Essence to Amber Essence. This is because the issues that you are encountering have changed to those of value. The dominant quality of your essential presence might be value for a few hours, a few minutes, a few weeks, maybe a few months. During this time, the transformation will activate all the questions relating to value at different levels.
LOSING THE THREAD Of course, your essential presence will not determine your mandala completely because your mandala is also impacted by the universal mandala. But the more involved you are in the inner work—the more the work becomes your first priority—the more the essential presence becomes a greater determining force than external reality. If your involvement is more in the world and less with essential realization, your experience of what happens in the world will determine your mandala more.
Losing the thread in the second journey means losing the awareness of this essential presence. Maintaining the thread means that you’re always aware of your presence, whatever is going on. When issues come up, for example, dealing with them doesn’t mean that you leave essential presence and jump into the first journey; you can continue being aware of the essential presence as the issues and the feelings around them arise.
It has to be intimate to you. When you know where you are, it is personally you. You begin to feel this personalness, and with it can arrive the love, the sweetness, and the compassion.
ALMAAS: It’s exciting, you know, to be yourself. That’s what it means to find where you are: to be yourself continuously instead of just having blips of yourself. You’re being there, you’re being personally you and going through your life. That sense of being there becomes the center of your life. Your life is the whole mandala and the flow of that mandala—and you become the center of it, its identity. Then there is an intimacy and a personal quality to your life. You are finding your truth—not in contrast to somebody else’s truth, but yours in the sense that it is personal to you.
Journey without a Goal
These traditions, which have become increasingly accessible to Westerners of the past few decades, are generally oriented in a different way from what most people are comfortable with in this culture: away from life. For them, realization is not the fulfillment of human life on Earth, it is the freedom from that life. The Eastern approach usually defines liberation as freedom from cyclic existence, that is, from being born again on Earth. Therefore, the focus is more on the realization of ultimate true nature that transcends all life.
This realization is also an important part of our work in the Diamond Approach. If we are going to be truly free, we do need to understand and realize our true nature in as transcendent and fundamental a way as possible. However, just as important is how to apply this realization of ultimate true nature in everyday life. “Fine, I know what my true nature is, I can be my true nature, but what does that have to do with cooking dinner? How is it relevant to interacting with my family? How does it relate to living my everyday life?”
So concerns such as these come up all the time when you want to live a normal human life: Can I earn my living? How much money do I need to support myself, and can I stay in touch with my true nature while I do that? What kind of a living situation should I choose? What kind of people should I associate with? How much time should I spend with them, and what should I do when I am with them? What do I really need? These questions need to be addressed just as comprehensively as the realization of the subtlest inner nature. It is also necessary to be compassionate and loving not just in one’s inner practice, but also when dealing with people in ordinary life. This requires intelligence, efficiency, action, strength, and will—all the capacities needed for ordinary life.
Integrating Daily Life Into True Nature
But several thousand years of nonconcern about external life have had a defining influence on Eastern spirituality, and the integration of the spiritual and material is still the exception rather than the rule.
For example, if you go off to court because you have been sued, Being manifests in a specific form for you to be able to deal with this situation. It will be a different form from the one that will manifest when you go to bed or sit down to talk to a friend. And even in the latter case, Being will manifest differently when your friend is suffering from a relationship breakup than when your friend is putting you down and arousing your anger.
Goalless Inquiry
STUDENT: Isn’t it something of a goal to allow whatever is a barrier, whatever obscures the truth of our experience, to emerge and be released? ALMAAS: You can take something that happens in the process of inquiry as a goal, but no particular occurrence within the process is the goal of inquiry. The goal of inquiry is the adventure itself, if you can even call that a goal.
This is very tricky. You can always say, “The true self is pure awareness, so let’s develop awareness.” Or you can say, “The true self is lovingness; let’s develop love.” The true self means no blockages, so you can say, “Let’s work on blockages.” Many teachings do exactly that, but the true self does not say any of these things. The true self never tries to make anything happen. It does not have a particular position. It embodies an attitude of complete allowing and freedom: Whatever arises is fine. The true self will just guide you toward understanding your experience, appreciating it, and moving on. Finding your true self is a good thing, but there are many ways of going about it. In the Diamond Approach, we don’t look for it; it happens as a natural consequence of our inquiry. If you trust the process of following your thread, the optimizing dynamism will manifest whatever is supposed to happen. You do not even need to have the concept of true self.
Being Personal With Yourself
Conditioning From Spiritual Teachings
You see, our nature is positionless. Or, more accurately, reality always presents itself in positions—especially when we speak about it—but these positions are never fixed or rigid. Being’s dynamism is a process of positioning, but it’s a positioning that’s always fluid, always changing from one position to another. Being cannot be pinned down in one position. We can take these positions as pointers, but not as a frame into which to fit our experience. Being is not an image to fulfill and not a goal to try to attain by pushing our experience in that direction.
This situation points to why a necessary part of our work is the integration of one’s own inner support. For as long as you don’t have your own inner support, you’re going to rely on external supports, and frequently these will be concepts, ideas, and positions taken from the outside. Then, of course, you get yourself in a big knot and begin rebelling against these influences because you don’t like the fact that your mind has become dependent on them.
You cannot be free from external influence by pushing it away. What you need to be free from is your mind and its impressionability to external influence.
ALMAAS: That’s not true. You may think of inquiry as a restriction or as a chosen direction, but if you look at it more fully, you will find that this is not so. It is an openness to your experience, but that doesn’t mean allowing unconscious, limiting behavior to go unexamined.
self. I am not defining openness as going along with whatever happens without being aware of how open or closed the experience is. If we define openness this way, then most of the time your experience will be that of an unexamined, closed mind. This is the state of the ego-self, which is not openness, and which tends to block Being’s optimizing dynamism. There is no spiritual practice then, only ego activity that is compulsively trying to get someplace. So I do not think that a person who is distracting herself is being open. If a person is going along with a distraction, which is the usual condition of the ego-self, I don’t call that openness. Inquiry tends not to go along with distractions; it tends to focus you on what is actually going on. So there is a discipline in inquiry, but discipline does not necessarily contradict openness.
Conditioning Through Personal Experience
So to continue the example: If you’re feeling resentful, you might remember how much better you feel when you are compassionate. You remember that when you’re compassionate, you feel open and caring, so you tell yourself, “I should be caring,” thereby rejecting your state of resentment. Does that work? No. The compassionate state itself doesn’t have the attitude of rejecting you or your present state. Engaging in the rejection of any experience will go counter to this compassionate state and not toward it. This is a difficult lesson to learn, but if we inquire long and sincerely enough, we will probably get it at some point.
Practice Session: Your Relationship to Goals and Comparison The deepening of your personal inquiry will be supported by exploring your relationship to goals and comparison. You might want to take the time to do your own inquiry into this question. How do goals play a part in your inner process? In what ways are you influenced by the spiritual reading you do, the stories you hear from other people, and even the experiences
you have yourself? How do these influences affect your ability to stay in touch with your own inner development? Once you have answered these questions about your experience in general, you might want to take a closer look at them in a specific context. Here’s one possibility: Bring to mind the different ways you see yourself as a seeker. For example, you might experience yourself as the devotional type, as more oriented toward an intellectual approach, as a serious, disciplined meditator, as someone for whom service is an essential part of the journey, or some combination of these. Can you identify any goals that are linked to your sense of self? When you read or hear about others’ journeys, do you tend to compare your inclinations and personal style to theirs? Do you experience yourself losing touch with your own process when this happens? If you shift from one mode of seeking to another, do beliefs based on past experiences you have had in one mode tend to interfere with the unfoldment that occurs within another?
hanging loose, simply being without a position.
Many of the traditional paths that use techniques oriented toward accomplishing certain states teach their students in advanced stages of practice to let go of those techniques. This is referred to in different ways: the end of the search, nonmeditation, beyond practice, and so on. This relates to the kind of open-ended inquiry we are talking about here. But the difference is that nonmeditation is inherent in our way of inquiry from the start. It is the approach we use in our work from the beginning of the path of inquiry, not only in advanced stages of realization. We don’t have to wait until we reach a certain state to engage this free attitude. We can let ourselves be from the beginning. We may not be able to do it, because it’s subtle and tough. But at least we know from the beginning that ultimately there is no point in efforting. We make effort sometimes because we have to, because there is no other way. But we know from the start that effortlessness is the way.
You are intimate with yourself when you’re simply being where you are.
Diamond Guidance
Guidance doesn’t mean that somebody will tell you, “Don’t do this, do that.” In your meditation, you won’t necessarily hear a voice that says, “Tomorrow you should meditate for only thirty minutes, not forty-five.” Guidance doesn’t appear as an angel standing in your room and telling you, “Yes, marry her, she is the right person.” That can happen, but that is not what we mean by guidance
Guidance doesn’t appear only, or mostly, in the form of an angel or a wise old woman or man. It usually appears in the context of our normal everyday experience: in our relationships with our family and friends, in the state of our physical body, in our job situation, in what we feel and what emotional conflicts we are having. We want to be able to discern the guidance in all of these experiences so that our soul will unfold toward optimization. And since our mind can never know all the elements and forces involved in our experience and unfoldment, we need to listen to the guidance of Being itself—the guidance that is an expression of the intelligence of Reality. This is inherent to our Being, whose intelligence is in contact with everything.
We tend not to see the dynamic quality of our soul directly, especially its optimizing tendency. But if we reflect on our experience, we can discern this tendency. For instance, if we are sincere with ourselves, we realize at some point that we want to experience love. The soul inherently wants to give and receive love, to expand and deepen love. Our soul also seems to like it when things are true and genuine; she naturally wants to go toward more genuineness and authenticity. She also naturally prefers to feel more open, relaxed, and happy. We take all these values for granted, but they are actually indications of the dynamic optimizing force of Being in the soul. That is exactly how the force manifests in our experience: as a tendency toward maximization of love, pleasure, openness, truth, and authenticity. We are not like machines that run according to a certain programming. We have motives and drives that spring from the depths of our Being and impel us to go in certain directions, causing our experience to develop and evolve toward optimization and enhancement.
One way to conceive of the dynamism of Being is that it’s totally free and unprejudiced, and open to all possibilities.
The more your experience goes through filters—the ignorance that comprises our ego structures, beliefs, images, and fixed patterns—the more it becomes twisted and distorted. Then your actions can seem counter to optimization.
Optimizing Our Development
We must open to all dimensions of our ongoing experience, which might include sensations, beliefs, attitudes, judgments, preferences, patterns of attention, and so on. Our awareness of all these dimensions will clarify the nature of our soul’s unfoldment in the moment and also reveal the degree of our alignment with the optimizing force that is moving us—that is, whether we are evolving, devolving, or stuck, the only three possibilities. In other words, if by opening to an awareness of the totality of our experience, we see that our soul is actually moving in a direction contrary to openness and luminosity, then we recognize that we have not been aligned, that we have in fact been distorting our unfoldment by being out of touch with the optimizing force.
The Desire For Guidance
The more deeply we become involved in our unfoldment and the more we align with it, the more our external life situations become part of that unfolding. Issues such as which girlfriend or boyfriend to have, which business to be in, where and how to live, and so on, will become subsumed into the unfoldment. This is not necessarily true at the beginning of the journey, and it depends on the relevance of the particular situation to the overall unfoldment of the soul. For example, sometimes deciding which job to take is crucial for your unfoldment, but sometimes it isn’t. Guidance will function to help you see which job to take if that choice is relevant for your overall unfoldment. All the practical choices we have to make in life can be within the range of inner guidance if we look at them from the perspective of what will optimize our overall development.
Practice Session: Your Relationship to Inner and Outer Guidance This would be a good time to look at your own relationship to both inner and outer guidance. Do you see your own experience as a potential source of guidance? Do you believe that guidance must come from some source other than you? If you are currently working with a teacher, how is the guidance you receive from him or her different from or the same as your inner guidance? Do the two work together? Do they seem antithetical at times? Do you have different expectations of outer guidance than you have of inner guidance? If you are not currently in relationship with an outer guide or teacher: Do you seek out guidance or desire it? If so, what would you want guidance for? Have you had an experience of your own guidance? If so, what seems to cut you off from that experience at other times?
How Guidance Manifests
Thinking of guidance as a voice or a person telling you to do this or that indicates that you are not in touch with your own optimizing force. You are identifying with a child who is in need of a parent’s guiding hand for wisdom and direction.
If you need to learn about being vulnerable, for instance, it will place you in a situation where you get threatened. The manifestation of relevant situations is one effective method of the guidance.
Guidance, then, can create barriers for us so that we pay attention and learn. But in a deeper sense, it doesn’t need to create barriers, because the barriers already exist in the obscurations that distort our perceptions. So what we call barriers, or difficult experiences and situations, are nothing but the optimizing force coming through our filters and manifesting as a certain kind of experience that we find painful and perceive to be a barrier. If we understand the meaning of that experience, however, we have recognized the guidance. For instance, let’s say the optimizing force is taking you toward the quality of peace. Stillness and peacefulness happen to be the next things for you to learn. But you hit a certain barrier, which is a deep longing for your mother. The conjunction of the two—the movement toward the peace of Black Essence and the longing for your mother—may appear as a pattern of falling in love with people who have dark features. You find yourself always attracted to women with black hair and dark eyes. Every time you fall in love, it feels great. You feel, “Now I’ve got it, now my love is going to be peaceful. Now I’m going to have what I want.” But then you keep losing your lovers; the relationships never work out. You are seeing something true about the peacefulness—that it has to do with the blackness and the darkness. But it is mixed up with a need that you haven’t finished with: You still want your mother. So this combination manifests as falling in love with someone who is like your mother: a woman who also is like peace—dark. You could call that a barrier—you might even say that the optimizing force has created this barrier. It is more accurate, though, to see it as a manifestation of the optimizing force as it interacts with your mind. If you are attuned to the guidance and you are really observant, you might realize while you are fantasizing about your dark-haired lover that what you are seeing in your mind is that black, shining hair. That might make you wonder, “Why that black, shining hair, why always black, shining hair? What does that make me feel?” You might discover that it gives you a sense of richness, a sense of mystery. This line of inquiry will access the guidance, which will lead you to what it is you are really after. Our actual situation is more complex, however, because there is not just you in a static universe. There are other people too, with their own unfoldment and processes, and constant interactions between everybody. Add to that the evolution of Earth, of humanity, and of the whole universe.
This unfoldment, however, is invisible for a long time because it is so hard to separate our notions of guidance from the early imprint of being led through life by a wise and kindly parent. This deep unconscious…
However, at the surface of consciousness where our soul has become identified with external life, the optimizing force is generally obscured by the soul’s outward fixations. The unconscious longing for parental guidance continues to dominate the soul’s journey through life. From this level, the soul, as it develops, appears undirected, ignorant, and therefore in need of external guidance. As long as our orientation goes outward in order to seek meaning and direction, we will be unable to recognize the optimizing force that is already operating within us. True guidance appears only when we are willing to value our…
CHAPTER 13 True Guidance for…
Through trial and error, you can find your friend’s house even if you don’t have directions—given enough time. But in the spiritual domain, it’s not as easy as that. It’s not a matter of trying this street and that street until you finally find the right one; you don’t even know what is a street and what isn’t a street. And even if you can discern what is a street, you can’t tell whether it goes up or down. The whole terrain is a new reality. Trial and error doesn’t necessarily work, even if we have unlimited time, which we don’t. Our time is precious and must be used wisely. So when a person finds guidance, internal or external, that person is fortunate, blessed. And generally speaking, people who are cynical about guidance just keep getting more lost, and don’t even know what they’re missing. We are lost because all we have when we begin the journey is what everybody else in society has: a package of experiences, beliefs, and ideas absorbed from the culture and from our parents. All these are expressions of the conventional dimension, the ordinary and prevalent cultural wisdom.
Unless guidance comes from that source beyond, we keep moving from one place in the conventional dimension to another place in the same dimension. We haven’t got the vaguest idea of what awaits us, of what is possible in our potential. We don’t know the extent, the depth, the infinite possibilities that lie underneath the surface. So we tend to judge everything by our knowledge, attitudes, and feelings that come from that surface.
knowledge, we identify with the very barriers that prevent the depth from emerging and guiding us. This is why the conventional dimension is a state of spiritual sleep, of being spiritually lost. When we recognize that we are lost and that we cannot move out of our lostness with the conventional knowledge we have, we become aware of the terror of our situation. We recognize just how lost we are and how scary that is. We realize that whatever we try to do—read books, practice this or that technique, attend this or that workshop, try to figure out things ourselves—we do not feel any less lost. Our situation really is much more difficult, much more profound, than we allow ourselves to see for a long time. That’s why we speak of the terror of the situation—because it is so frightening to finally realize and admit how lost we are, and how at the mercy we are of so many elements that we have no handle on. The terror of the situation has a lot to do with how much we believe what we think we know, with how much we are caught in the gravity of our planet of conventional reality, believing it to be the center of the universe—and sometimes all that exists. We usually do not realize that our experience of reality has to shift only a little bit and all will disappear, leaving us totally terrified.
To get to another planet, we need a spaceship, and the kind of spaceship we need does not exist on this planet. The spaceship we need is a direct manifestation of guidance—the indication, the light that comes through from beyond this reality to show you further possibilities, possibilities you couldn’t even conceive of.
The Role Of Essential Guidance
As the dynamism takes the soul into new realms, our Being reveals many pure qualities, which I have called essential aspects. It displays the quality of Love, the quality of Clarity, the quality of Strength, the quality of Peace, the quality of Truth, the quality of Contentment, the quality of Spaciousness, the quality of Existence, the quality of Passion, and so on. These qualities are elements from the beyond, from the unseen world, and our conventional wisdom cannot fathom them, can’t really see or discern their meaning, function, or usefulness. So how can we discern what these essential qualities are? We need to recognize what they mean; we need to understand how they are related to our conventional experience and how they can optimize our lives. For this, we need a vehicle of understanding—a source of discrimination and knowledge—that originates from the same or a deeper dimension than the one these qualities come from.
Our Being not only displays its richness, it also provides us with the capacity to comprehend, appreciate, and integrate that richness. Without this discrimination, we are only able to approach this richness as candy. We don’t understand the significance of the richness, that it is really part of our inner nature, so we just want more and more of the candy—these things that taste sweet and wonderful but are separate from who we are.
Diamond Presence
This kind of knowledge is not available in the conventional dimension; it is not conventional wisdom. In some sense it is a magical property, because there is no rational explanation for it. So this knowledge of the Red Essence does not arise from our storehouse of acquired knowledge, it arises independent of our mind. It is real knowledge, authentic knowledge, because you didn’t get it from someone or something or arrive at it through logical analysis or deduction. It is a direct knowingness, a new basic knowledge. It’s an insight that comes from the very depths of the Red Essence itself. The Red Essence is stating what it is. Not, of course, through one word, one sentence, or one insight, but through an entire gestalt of understanding. And there is no question here about the accuracy of the
new knowledge; the only barrier that arises is the veil of our conventional knowledge reacting to this new knowledge and trying to distort it. However, if the Red Essence arises in this new dimension, which I call the Diamond Dimension, then any conventional knowledge that is trying to impose itself on the true, direct knowledge of the aspect will be exposed. The Diamond Guidance manifests at this point because this capacity of knowing can withstand and transcend the dullness of our conventional knowledge and manifest the truth about the Red Essence. Independent of our subjective mind, it can show us what is objective and what is not. It can let us know what is and what is not completely precise. That’s why we say that the aspect is arising on the diamond level: It has clarity, precision, and indestructibility. On the diamond level, we don’t experience the Red Essence in the usual way, as a red fullness, flow, or fire. If it occurred in this way, our knowledge of the Red Essence would be susceptible to our conventional mind, to our beliefs and reactions. Instead we experience a red diamond, a faceted ruby. There is a precision in the experience of a red diamond, an exactness and definiteness. These characteristics simply reflect the fact that we are experiencing the aspect in such a way that its meaning is inseparable from the direct experience of it. We know precisely what the Red Essence is because we are experiencing the Red diamond, which is experience and knowledge as one. So, without the diamond level of experience, there would be no possibility of precise knowing, and hence of Diamond Guidance. Only people who have experienced the diamond level know its reality. People who have not experienced it cannot know it. This is true about any form of deep spiritual knowledge, for this kind of knowingness does not exist in the conventional dimension. That’s why when one knows, one seems certain and definite, for one is in touch with the source that is the knowledge itself. It is only then that a person can function well as a guide, not before.
That doesn’t mean we can’t use the conventional level. When we operate from this Diamond Dimension of Essence, we do use words and the concepts underlying them to transmit and reveal direct knowledge. Words and concepts, which exist on the conventional level, are empty vessels that can carry something that is beyond them, but they are not knowledge itself; they are attempts at elucidating knowledge in order to communicate it.
The knowledge itself is experienced, is sensed. When the aspects arise on the diamond level, they impact the soul by touching it in such a way that the soul starts having spontaneous insights about its experience. The diamond quality touches the substance of the soul, which starts to open up, allowing the knowledge that is coming from that aspect to arise. The soul becomes receptive to a knowledge that comes from beyond, from the unseen world. It is revealed knowledge. It is no longer merely the experience of Essence, it is essential wisdom.
We begin to recognize the Diamond Dimension itself as all the essential aspects appear anew, in the diamond form. Now, instead of experiencing a fluid or formless presence, we experience a faceted bright diamond, a ruby, or an emerald, for instance. In the emerald experience, we have the sense of loving-kindness and warmth inherent to Compassion, but with a precision, a definiteness, and an exactness not familiar in conventional experience. The diamond restructures the soul in such a way that its experience is now inseparable from insight, from direct knowledge. Understanding, then, is simply the stream of structuring of our soul by the diamond and what it is communicating.
Most people take the description of an experience to be the understanding. However, when we use the word “understanding,” we mean the actual impression in the soul created by the arising aspect. This is a felt experience, a tasted, touched knowledge, with a direct discrimination of different patterns, flavors, and textures. The discernment of the pattern—not the description or the communicated words—is the understanding.
What is meaning, in this case, and how does it relate to understanding? Meaning is nothing but the recognition of the structure and pattern of our experience. Meaning is not a word, it is a discernment of what an experience is. When meaning pervades experience, it transforms it into understanding.
Diamond Structures
So Being not only manifests itself in aspects, but also in combinations of aspects that we call Diamond Dimensions or Diamond Vehicles. The Diamond Guidance, though experienced at times as an aspect, is actually one of these vehicles. The Diamond Guidance is an essential presence made out of diamonds, in which all the aspects combine together as one beautiful, colorful, luminous vehicle—not unlike a spaceship—in a precise, delineated form. And since each aspect manifests here as the understanding of the aspect itself, the structure that combines all of these diamonds into one presence operates as the vehicle for understanding in general. This vehicle then functions as guidance on the diamond level. This is a direct description, not a metaphor, of what the Diamond Guidance is.
When we try to logically prove to somebody who doesn’t know about the essential dimension that there is such a thing as the Red Essence, for instance, we are bound to fail. You can describe certain experiences associated with the Red Essence and the person may be inclined to feel that there is such a thing, but you cannot really prove that it exists.
The Functions Of Diamond Guidance
How it functions depends on the intensity of your present need, on the depth of experience that is manifesting, and on your receptivity. Receptivity means your capacity, your level of development, your openness, your trust, and your sincerity.
Intellectual discernment is an expression of this inherent discrimination, but the capacity for discrimination that the Diamond Guidance provides is not only on the intellectual level. It is on the feeling, experiential, sensing, and perceptual levels as well. The discriminating capacity of the Diamond Guidance can be seen and appreciated as the prototype of the capacity for discrimination at all levels. It is the essential nous, the expression in the soul of the universal nous—the wisdom of discrimination. To effectively and fully operate using the Diamond Guidance, we need to be able to function on all levels of discrimination. It is important to have intellectual discrimination, for example, not because we are primarily intellectual, but because intellectual discrimination is necessary for describing a feeling, a sensed discrimination, or a perceived one. It is also necessary to have emotional and sensate discrimination to appreciate the subtleties in our lived experience.
However, unfoldment can happen without understanding. For example, I may be experiencing a fountain in my chest manifesting different qualities and colors. We would call this perception of the spontaneous arising of immediate experience unfoldment. But I could have this experience without its having any meaning for me and simply relate to it as an unusual, pleasurable occurrence. When the qualities I am perceiving also reveal their meaning and significance, we call it understanding: “I can feel that the fountain arising in my chest reflects the opening of my heart, revealing its true nature as an overflowing fullness. Now I am understanding what is going on.” It is this capacity for effective understanding that makes the Diamond Guidance the revealer of truth in its various dimensions. By giving us the capacity to understand the pattern or structure of our experience, it reveals the truth of our Being.
The Diamond Guidance also enhances our capacity for articulation. The articulation of experience requires many capacities, one of which is the knowledge of words, syntax, and grammar. But we cannot articulate our experience if it is not first delineated and discriminated clearly in our awareness.
The presence of the Diamond Guidance activates, enhances, and sharpens our capacity for inner investigation, exploration, and study. Inquiry comes into its own now, guided by the objective discriminating intelligence of Being, as we will see in future chapters. At this stage, we are engaged in the hyperdrive travel of the second journey. Now, for example, we can discriminate the effects of our past on our present experience and attitudes in greater and greater depth. And through direct knowledge, insight, and understanding, our inquiry can unfold with more efficiency and dynamism at all levels.
is the prototype of the friend who truly wants us to return home to what we love most. It is the prototype of the teacher who can reveal to us objective knowledge of reality and our relationship to it. And it is the prototype of the guide who recognizes the meaning and…
CHAPTER 14 Guidance as Gift to…
THE UNFOLDMENT OF THE SOUL is a truly mysterious process. If we try to analyze it, we find that it is very complex because the elements involved are infinite. But we need to discern only certain factors, outlines, or patterns—we don’t actually need to know all the elements—for the unfoldment to happen. Our Being possesses an infinite redundancy, meaning that even if we see only some of the patterns, the Diamond Guidance will still emerge. So recognizing some of the patterns in our experience begins to liberate and orient our consciousness to receive the Guidance. It is as though our atoms need to be aligned in a certain direction by a set of magnets to create the…
The Diamond Guidance descends, and it is as if a spaceship has just landed. The power and magnificence of the descent is not unlike what was portrayed at the end of the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, when the mother ship lands. The air becomes electrified; all is still and yet pulsing with a brilliance of dancing colors and qualities. One may hear the powerful hum of the spaceship’s engines. One can feel a sense of elegance and delicacy. Then consciousness begins to attain a quality of precision, a quality of brilliance, and a quality of exquisite, sharp clarity. It is no longer the normal consciousness that is inquiring but the consciousness pervaded and transformed by the pure light of the…
This extraordinary presence changes our experience completely; it is as if the atoms of our consciousness were being cleansed with Arctic ice that has never been touched, with…
The essential qualities appear now as precisely cut diamonds of various colors and qualities. We experience Strength, for example, as an exhilarating, strong sense of precision, with aliveness and beauty. The joyfulness of the Yellow aspect has an intense kind of sweetness that is almost overwhelming. In comparison to these essential qualities, our usual experience is old and stale. It doesn’t have the possibility of true vibrancy or alive consciousness, where each atom feels as if it could open a thousand miles wide and explode at the same time with a delicious, tingling energy. The experience of Essence on the level of the Diamond Guidance is a kind of consciousness that memory cannot capture. You either experience it now or you don’t…
INVITING THE BLESSING OF DIAMOND GUIDANCE In other traditions, the Diamond Guidance is sometimes called the angel of revelation, the holy spirit that brings the word or message from the source. It is the angel that guides us to the Beingness that is our ground, our nature, our source. It is the true friend, the total friend, because the Guidance’s only concern is for you as a soul to go back to your source, to be who and what you can be, with total acceptance, total support, total guidance, total kindness. The soul needs to place herself in the right attitude for this kind of blessing to come. You have to…
When we are learning the proper attitudes of inquiry, it is as though we were building the platform, the flight deck, where our spacecruiser can land. Then our inquiry becomes illuminated and guided. It is inseparable…
For the Diamond Guidance to come, we have to feel, even if just for a second, that we really want the truth for its own sake regardless of any other considerations. When it does come, we recognize that giving up the world wasn’t that much of a sacrifice. What we receive is infinitely more precious, infinitely more fulfilling, more beautiful, more exquisite; we recognize that what we get is the best thing possible. We recognize that the world, and our life in it, is merely a place, a context, a universal vessel for that preciousness to arise. We see that the world is not valuable in and of itself; it exists so that the preciousness of true nature can come into our lives. Before we can truly say that we are spiritual, we have to recognize that spirit is paramount and the world is only the experiential locus where the experience of spiritual…
The Experience Of Diamond Guidance
When the Diamond Guidance arises, it is like experiencing the descent into stillness of a diamond-like vehicle, so graceful and fine that you can only think of it as an angel or a divine emissary. Not that it looks like an angel with wings, but it has a sense of purity, of divinity, of a transporting quality of consciousness, otherworldly yet infusing this world with light and goodness. It is perhaps these qualities that have caused it to be perceived as an angel in the context of a different logos, such as Christianity.
It actually looks more like a spaceship than what we call an angel. It is a latticed structure of myriad diamonds of pure consciousness. Each diamond is a specific quality and color, and together they create one unified structure that sits on a round platform of pure solid silver, which then sits on a larger round platform of pure solid gold. Gold is the essential truth, and silver is the will of the truth, and together they function as the foundation for all of the qualities that appear in diamond form. This Diamond Vehicle can be of any size. It can descend and fill a whole room or a whole valley. It can be experienced as arising in the soul. Its mode of operation in inquiry can be experienced at the forehead as an illumination, a pulsation, a tingling, a dancing of presence. But the Diamond Guidance may also descend into the heart or the belly. It can be very tiny or as big as a galaxy. Space doesn’t bound it. It is amazing that there is such a presence. The experience of the Diamond Guidance itself is that of a presence, an awareness inseparable from the sense of hereness. There is a subtlety and a refinement in this presence, a purity and a gentleness. It is both full and delicate, with a gracefulness to the delicacy, a flowing ease that is inseparable from a peaceful quietness. The discrimination of the Diamond Guidance is different from that of a mind full of thoughts and agitation. Here the understanding is quiet, peaceful, and settled. And this quietness, this peacefulness, this settledness, which is inseparable from precision and clarity, functions as the source of insight and understanding. Insight arises with clarity in the environment of peace. The presence of the Diamond Guidance is a stillness that is inherently luminous and illuminating, as if the presence had atoms of illumination, of clear light, that illuminate with various brilliant colors. These colors affect our heart with feelings of warmth, sweetness, wonder, and joy, giving a sense of sacredness or holiness to the presence. Usually the Diamond Guidance operates as a presence in the center of the forehead. When it arises in support of discrimination and understanding, we become aware of an expansion as space opens
up in the forehead. With that expansion comes a sense of peacefulness; the Black aspect at the center of the forehead opens and we feel stillness and spaciousness. When the Diamond Guidance arises in this peacefulness, we feel a delicate presence, a pulsating energy that possesses a sense of clarity and transparency, an intelligence, an illumination. This delicate, pulsing, breathing presence appears as understanding, as insight, as intuition. As the forehead opens, we feel the Diamond Guidance as a tingling, an energetic throbbing—but very delicate, very soft, very subtle. If we are not attuned, we might dismiss it as just a physical twitch. Or if there is a lot of blockage, as is often the case in the early stages of our development, the diamond might feel hard. Due to the blockage, it can’t get through, so it feels almost like a rock. But if we are relaxed and open, we feel it as a softness, a delicacy. This delicacy gives our perception a sense of clarity and precision, such…
Attitudes Toward Guidance
If you believe that discrimination can only be mental or that all knowledge is only the normal conventional knowledge and that no other kind exists—that there is no possibility of having direct revealed knowledge—then you won’t be open to the functioning of the Diamond Guidance, in yourself or in anybody else. So we need to look at our positions and attitudes regarding such precise guidance. We need to see and expose our beliefs, our intellectual and emotional biases, and our orientations about such a definite, real guidance. We do not need to adopt a belief in it, for that will not work, but we need to be open to it as a possibility.
Practice Session: Your Experience of Guidance
What are your beliefs, hopes, fears, doubts, and expectations about real guidance? You began this exploration in chapter 12; now you can go deeper and be more specific in your exploration with this expanded awareness of what guidance can offer and how it operates in your soul. Do you have faith that guidance will show up for you? Do you trust that you can follow it and not be led astray? To answer these questions, look back into your personal history for your experiences with guidance. Can you identify situations in which you called on guidance and were disappointed that it did not appear? Or times when you followed what you felt was clear inner guidance and felt somehow betrayed by the outcome? What feelings or thoughts tend to arise in you when you have the impulse to call on guidance? How do they relate to your past experiences? To what degree is your basic relationship with guidance relaxed and open? cynical? fearful? blocked? How has your personal history shaped your sense of the specific ways that guidance can or can’t show up and work in your life?
So in some sense, the first job of the Guidance is to reveal our barriers against it. As it descends, it pushes against and challenges the parts of our mind and psyche that deny it, that don’t believe in it, that doubt it.
It is true that guidance is a grace, a benediction, a blessing from beyond, from the source that is unseen; however, blessings do not arise if we are not open to them. Blessing does not try to bore into us like a power drill. It is very delicate in its operation. It doesn’t come to us when we are defended, doubtful, resisting, and disbelieving in guidance. It arises only when we relax, open up, and don’t take positions against it.
So I am not saying to replace negative belief with positive belief. Openness is the absence of belief.
Faith In Guidance
The Guidance reveals to us the truth and richness of our Being, but the more it reveals these things, the more we are in touch with its mystery. This is a paradoxical, strange, and mysterious situation. Over time, the Guidance reveals to us more and more about our true nature, reality, and about what and who we are. However, the more knowledge and understanding we gain through this revelation, the more we approach the depth, the essence, of our Being, which is mystery. So the increasing and deepening insight and knowledge do not lead us to a satisfying conclusion about who and what we are. We don’t end up with a static picture of ourselves and reality. The more understanding and insight we have, the more our soul becomes transparent to the mystery, and the more we recognize that our Being is mysterious. So understanding doesn’t create or add anything; in fact, it removes what is there to start with. That is why ego tends to experience objective understanding and guidance as some kind of a loss. The ego keeps losing its beliefs, ideas, positions, identifications, and attitudes. But the more we feel this loss that we experience as understanding, the more in touch we are with the essence of our Being, and the more mysterious we recognize it is.
This brings in another consideration, which is that we not only need to be open to the Guidance, we also need to have faith in it. We need to have confidence in its efficacy and capacity; otherwise, it won’t guide us. Or if it is already guiding us, we won’t know that it is guiding us.
Since you do not know where it is going to take you, there is no other way but to trust it and take its promptings on faith. Opening up to the Diamond Guidance requires a lot of faith, confidence, and trust, because as we said, to move from knowledge to mystery means to continually jump into unknown places.
Doubting The Guidance
For example, if you have worked with the Black Essence, you know that its center—what the Sufis call khafi, “the hidden”—is in the middle of the forehead, which is exactly where the Diamond Guidance functions. The subjective state of doubt is one of the main barriers against the peace of Black Essence. Doubt of any kind will block this center because doubt is partly an expression of hatred; it is not the same as authentic questioning or curiosity.
From this ambivalence, doubt arises, and the doubt has a destructive, hateful quality in reaction to our history of pain and betrayal. As a result, the doubt tries to discount the insights or the messages of the Guidance. Openness to the Guidance can easily be destroyed by doubt. Normally, when truth first arises, it is…
question. Questioning means curiosity and openness, while doubt expresses skepticism and fear. Curiosity says, for example, “Well, let me find out. I am open and curious and I’m happy to really inquire into whether guidance exists or not.” Doubt says, “I don’t…
Doubt or skepticism is a negative energy, a distorted expression of our Being, while curiosity and inquiry is a positive energy, an…
Doubt is a direct manifestation of the absence of faith in guidance. Yet some people feel that doubt is needed to avoid being duped, taken for granted, or led by the nose into something they will later regret. However, the absence of doubt is neither compliance nor dependence but instead a curiosity and openness. Only these qualities will reveal what is truly needed for our soul’s unfolding. Questioning and inquiry evokes and invokes the Guidance through an inviting attitude: “I don’t have a position, I don’t need to protect any belief or point of view. I am open to finding out what is true.” Doubt, on the other hand, is protective and defensive: “I want to…
Whether it was due to doubt, lack of faith, contrary beliefs, insufficient or distorted parental guidance, fear of surrender, or attachment to worldly rewards, most of us have lived our life without the benefit of true guidance. This has meant being cut off from our soul’s depth. We have lived with a diminished potential for discrimination, knowledge, and understanding of the experiences and qualities in our life that touch us most deeply. We have lived in a world devoid of true meaning, using only our mind to make connections and draw conclusions about how best to proceed. Consciously or not, we have looked outside ourselves for…
THE GUIDANCE AS BELOVED When you have seen through the doubts that block your faith in the optimizing force of Being, your heart relaxes and opens. As your experience of truth in your life deepens, your heart is nourished. As your knowing of the Diamond Guidance as the revealer of truth grows, your heart awakens to what it most appreciates. The Diamond Guidance is the wisdom that leads you home, to the place where your heart knows its greatest joy. This is the land of truth and true nature. The Guidance is not simply a path to the truth, it is the manifestation of truth, the knowingness of truth, and a discerning intimacy with the truth. So the attitude in the soul that can most directly invite this blessing of truth to arise is one of heartfelt love. This is not only the heart’s openness but its active love and interest in knowing and being intimate with the truth. To love to know the truth means to love the operation of the Diamond…
The heart gets what it wishes for much more often than we think. What the heart deeply wishes for, it ends up having in some way. So if we wish for the immediate and intimate knowingness of the truth, that’s exactly what will happen. Diamond Guidance will arise and operate by revealing the truth. The love of truth is not the only necessary element, but it…
Gabriel is the messenger of God, or the truth, and Diamond Guidance is an essential manifestation whose function is to reveal the essential truth in our experience. So when you say, “I want to know the truth,” it means your heart wants the truth to be revealed. This is an invitation for the revealer to descend and manifest. The heart is inviting the angel of revelation, the revealer…
The Diamond Guidance is the inner teacher. So you say to the inner teacher, “I am interested. I would love for you to teach me. I will surrender to the teaching. I’ll dedicate myself.” You would do the same with an external teacher. It’s true that your teacher helps you, guides you, and reveals the truth of Being to you.
as we integrate this wisdom of the Diamond Guidance, we come to understand our true home in the larger unfolding of all creation.
CHAPTER 15 Guidance and Understanding
Understanding Understanding
The word “understanding” is normally used in a more limited way than how we use it in the Diamond Approach.
The idea that guidance and spiritual realization can be discovered through understanding our experience is a perspective that is quite accessible to our ordinary mind, even though it is not common in traditional teachings. I like this approach because it doesn’t require any esoteric or exotic ideas, beliefs, or symbols in order to engage in the inner work. Understanding is something that we can relate to directly.
The lack of complete and precise understanding of our experience perpetuates it in a cyclic, repetitive pattern. Therefore, when we precisely understand our experience, it naturally opens up to deeper dimensions.
This is a natural law of the inner life: that the understanding of a situation necessitates the awareness of elements that are deeper than how the situation first appears to us.
This is because understanding is not a matter of understanding a still picture. It is more like understanding a movie. In fact, understanding requires and implies appreciation of change and transformation. If you experience only one thing, for instance, there is no understanding. If you only feel emptiness, for instance, and absolutely nothing else, no understanding is possible. You will only have the awareness of emptiness.
So understanding is dynamic in nature. And its continuity is nothing but a deepening of experience, which is the revelation of the hidden potentials of our soul. This revelation does not occur in snapshots—though we often remember it and attempt to hold on to it as though it does—but always as a continuous flow of understanding.
Understanding is not a matter of bringing something into our experience, and it is not a matter of doing something to it. It is a matter of seeing the true nature of what is there.
When the Diamond Guidance is operating without restrictions, understanding is the arising of new elements inseparable from the recognition of their meanings.
Diamond Guidance functions through the opening up of our experience, activating it so that it becomes more than simply experience; it also becomes understanding. So our experience itself changes to understanding—it changes from repetitive, everyday experience to dynamic, unfolding understanding. So instead of our just having an experience, the significance becomes available to us as part of the experience itself. Experience divulges its meaning—reveals its significance—through the process of understanding. It is then luminous experience.
Understanding And Knowledge
For example, as you inquire into your experience, let’s say you realize that you are feeling hopeless. This is knowledge, it is not yet understanding, for even though you know what you are feeling, you do not understand it. But understanding your hopelessness includes—in fact, depends on—knowing that you feel hopeless. The understanding, however, goes further because it is the comprehension of the significance of the hopelessness: how it affects you, what it means, where it comes from, how it’s related to the rest of your experience, and so on. When understanding finally reveals itself, it can become knowledge. You can store it as a piece of knowledge, as information in your mind. But as it is happening, understanding uses knowledge, yet it is much more than knowledge or knowing.
In the Diamond Approach, we include reasoning and mental association in our use of the word “understanding,” but the fundamental element of understanding is direct experience, basic knowledge. That is because we cannot have real understanding if we are not in touch with our present experience, if we don’t feel our experience fully and intimately.
This means that our discrimination is usually not pure; it’s a mix—the direct knowingness is mixed with ideas and associations. However, over time, our understanding will purify our direct knowing, freeing it from ordinary knowledge.
Practice Session: Your Experience of Understanding In order to better appreciate this meaning of understanding, you might want to take some time to reflect on a particular time when you have recognized understanding such as this arising in your experience. How did you feel when that occurred? What did you notice about how it arose? Did certain elements seem to be significant in the process of coming to that understanding—such as reasoning, direct insight, discrimination, and so on? Was there a sense of immediacy and personal relevance? Did the understanding you gained clarify the meaning of other experiences in your life? Consider the ways that you may have been affected in an ongoing way by this understanding. When you finish this exploration, bring the question more into present time. Did you feel the process of understanding at work as you did this inquiry? Notice if you can sense the dynamism of the understanding arising and how it moved the inquiry forward.
Revealing The Pattern
Each one of these colors could represent a quality of experience in the soul. One quality is pressure, another is density, another is weight. You can discriminate all of these when you are completely and intimately in touch with the very fabric of your experience. When the in-touchness with the fabric is sufficiently clear and precise, the pattern of its qualities becomes discriminated. Understanding now is not only the awareness of the various patterns, but also an overall comprehension of the meaning of the patterns, which together form the overall picture.
Obviously, understanding requires an intimate awareness of experience. It requires intimate contact with your own consciousness—a deep awareness of your thoughts, feelings, sensations, and actions, of all the colors and impressions that arise in your experience. All these must be present in your awareness, not vaguely but in a very clear, crisp way. When our awareness is crisp, we call it diamond-like, for it is very precise, clear discrimination. Red is red, blue is blue, pressure is pressure, and lightness is lightness. When the pattern is precise and clear, it automatically reveals its meaning: “This red is not only red but feels strong; it makes me feel strong,” and “I’m feeling strong in my upper body, but down here in my pelvis, I am feeling weak.” That awareness may lead you to understand why you feel strength in one part of your body and weakness in another part and how that affects your experience of yourself.
Understanding And Unfoldment
The operation of the Diamond Guidance transforms our usual experience into a clear, direct discernment of the meaningfulness of whatever is arising.
But understanding itself is not limited to the patterns within space and time; it can take us further, beyond space and time.
In the beginning of the journey of understanding, our spacecruiser travels within our individual soul; our individual experience is this unfolding fabric. As our experience deepens and expands, this fabric loses its boundaries as the underlying nature of pervasiveness and unity impacts our experience. Then our entire experience—of the whole universe, not just our inner individual experience—becomes an unfolding fabric of manifestation. We are intimately in touch with this unfoldment, understanding it with knowledge, clarity, and insight. The whole universe begins to reveal its nature to us. Our experience then becomes the experience of realization and the integration of this realization through the continuity of understanding. Realization is not just an insight, it is the continuity of unfoldment of all manifestation, with complete clarity, intimacy, and comprehension. So understanding turns out to be the ongoing life of realization—the continuity of the realized experience, the continuity of the fully aware, fully integrated experience.
It becomes a piece of ordinary knowledge that can disconnect us from our experience. Holding on to understanding as knowledge is useful only if it opens up our understanding in the present moment. In this way our wisdom and experience from the past can serve to open up our current experience even further.
The Guidance is an operation of intelligence that uses awareness, knowing, clarity, feeling, memory, and reason—uses all these faculties in a way that encourages and prompts experience to clarify itself, and through clarifying itself, to unfold. During the first journey, in the initial phases of the practice of inquiry, the fabric of experience is our thoughts, feelings, emotions, sensations, actions, and all of our life situations. Later, in the second journey, the fabric becomes more continuously colored by presence itself. By the third journey, there’s nothing but the fabric of presence. Then all experience is presence, with the various discriminations in it. So the immediacy and intimacy with experience is complete only in the third journey. During the first journey, we only see isolated parts of the fabric—a pattern here, a pattern there, but with gaps in between. In the second journey, we recognize that there is presence as well. This presence is inherent consciousness that is part of these patterns and moves through them as the most meaningful thread. In the third journey, we recognize that presence pervades all the patterns. In fact, we recognize that the patterns are nothing but patterns in the presence itself. Then the immediacy is complete. Then we are the understanding of our experience at each moment.
These aspects, as we will see, form the essential and timeless prototypes for curiosity, discrimination, determination, sensitivity, clarity, truth, and intelligence, among others—the fundamental elements and faculties that make inquiry possible. We will see how they provide the operational supports for inquiry, so that it can invite the guidance of our Being, the Diamond Guidance.
The essential aspects are related to the qualities in the various states and stations of Sufism, and to some of the divine names; to the spiritual qualities of the sefirot in the Kabbalah; and to the Buddha qualities in Mahayana Buddhism. The view we have developed of these different manifestations of Being, however, is not taken from any of these ancient teachings. It is the result of original discoveries based on a new paradigm that is fundamental to the Diamond Approach.
The presence of each aspect imbues the soul with a certain property of consciousness that opens it up and develops its potential, providing it with a specific subtle capacity or faculty of functioning. For example, the aspect of Truth, which we will look at fully in chapter 23, possesses a specific affect discernible as truth. It provides the soul with the capacity to directly differentiate truth from falsehood.
THE LATAIF What we all wish for ultimately is to simply and authentically be. This wish to be ourselves is the true motivation for inquiry. And this impulse, this motivation, is actually an expression of one of the aspects of Essence—the Yellow latifa. As they are needed, the other lataif arise to support this movement in our soul. So, for example, one needs the strength and capacity to engage in one’s spiritual work (the Red latifa), the will to persevere in the face of difficulties, attachments, and conditioning (the White latifa), the perceptual expansion necessary to perceive and understand what one is experiencing (the Black latifa), and the sensitivity to recognize and rest in one’s own true nature (the Green latifa). These fundamental capacities of the soul, which are called the five sacred impulses—I wish, I can, I will, I perceive, and I am—are associated with the lataif. For this reason, the lataif are the most important essential aspects encountered in the development of the soul. This is true especially in the initial stages of spiritual work as the individual consciousness (the soul) opens up to its essential nature. Lataif is the plural of the Arabic word latifa, which refers to a certain mode of experiencing our consciousness. Latifa or latif (masculine form of the feminine latifa) means literally “subtle, soft, light, delicate, gentle, refined, pure”—all in one unified impression. We call these aspects of Essence the lataif in accordance with the Sufi tradition, which devotes a specific area of its teaching to them.
THE FIVE CENTERS Most Sufi writers agree that there are five primary lataif, or centers of perception (though some describe six), and there is general agreement about the colors associated with them and their locations in the human body. The one at the left side of the body is usually called qalb, meaning “heart.” The color yellow is associated with it. In the Diamond Approach, the state of consciousness here is that of the true delight in which Essence exists in the condition of unadulterated joy. The latifa on the right side of the body is usually called ruh, meaning “spirit” or “soul.” The color is red, and the consciousness is of true and real strength. It is like the fire of Essence. The third latifa is located at the solar plexus and is associated with the colors white or silver. The name of this latifa is sirr, which means “secret.” The consciousness is that of true will, which is the support for Essence and its life. The fourth latifa is at the forehead between and just above the eye-brows. It is called khafi, meaning “hidden,” and the color is a shining black. The consciousness is a state of peace and absolute stillness. The fifth latifa is at the center of the chest and is called akhfa, meaning “more hidden,” and the color is emerald green. The consciousness is that of sensitivity, of loving-kindness and compassion. Our view recognizes that each of the lataif has several levels or dimensions of spiritual perception and experience. This is a significant difference from the Sufi teaching, which associates each of the lataif with a different level of development of the soul. In the Diamond Approach, these different levels of soul development depend on the development of all of the lataif, as one progresses through deepening levels of realization. In the Diamond Approach, we work deeply with each of these basic qualities of our consciousness in order to activate the inner journey. Clarifying the distinction between these aspects—Joy, Strength, Will, Compassion, and Peace—and their familiar counterparts (or “false” forms) that exist within the conventional reality of the ego helps to cultivate an awareness of our essential presence. Each latifa has one or more personality issues that are universal barriers to the presence of that aspect. This means that working with the quality and its relationship to our experience will also resolve—through understanding—fundamental personality issues not normally understood to be spiritual difficulties.
Idries Shah relates the work of some Christian alchemists to the activation of the lataif. In discussing the order of activation by both Sufis and alchemists, he writes, “The alchemical exercises therefore aim at activating colors (locations = lataif ) in the form of crossing oneself. This is an adaptation of the Sufi method which is thus, in order of activation: yellow-red-white-black-green.”2 In our work, we do not try to follow any specific order; instead we allow the intrinsic dynamism of Being to activate the lataif in whatever order is needed by the particular individual. We find that the inherent intelligence of Being activates the lataif differently in each person according to his or her specific needs and situation.
In the Diamond Approach, we do not take this notion of centers as primary. We observe that each latifa is more defined by the quality of consciousness than by the physical location. The connection to the locations seems to occur mostly at the initial activation or opening of these qualities of subtle experience. After that, the lataif may arise independent of the physical centers.
In the last chapter, we examined the Yellow latifa, which brings the quality of playfulness, curiosity, and delight into the exploration of our experience. But we all know that sometimes it is difficult to delight in the inquiry process because defenses and resistances, painful feelings and emotions, and a lack of understanding can make the journey arduous and trying. Such challenges often make us lose our sense of openness and love of the truth. This situation would be impossible to transform if it weren’t for the openness of our true nature, which manifests an infinite potential for responding to what arises.
If we consider our experience at any moment, the first and most obvious thing we notice is that it is not homogeneous. That is, our experience contains many elements that are different from each other: colors, shapes, sounds, textures, sensations, feelings, and thoughts all combined in the experience but differentiated. If our experience were only of one thing and nothing else, we would have no experience. So the fact that there is experience means that more than one impression is present. We technically refer to this by saying that the field of experience is always differentiated.
If I just see differences, there will be no knowledge, only perception. Differentiation is necessary for perception, but my perception will have no meaning until I begin to recognize what these differences are.
Of course, that brings in all the issues that are difficult to deal with—the anxieties and conflicts around the separation. But the human soul will have to separate in order
Furthermore, being courageous doesn’t mean being foolhardy—jumping into danger without understanding. The courage we’re talking about is the courage to recognize the situation for what it is, to be willing to see the truth as it is, regardless of how frightening it may be. This is the courage of discrimination. Another way of saying this is: Taking a risk is not the same thing as putting yourself at risk. The courage we need for inquiry is not a matter of being counterphobic, where you just jump into the situation without acknowledging your fear. That’s foolish, not courageous.
It’s okay once in a while—even necessary sometimes—to be excited as you jump from one thing to another, fired up by the Red, but if the whole process of inquiry is like that, there will be no real depth, no integration, no maturation. It’s just like a pattern of ending a relationship after six months and immediately falling in love with someone else. There’s a great deal of excitement every time that happens, but the relationships never become deep or rich. In that case, one could end up thinking that the purpose of relationship is just to enjoy the initial hit of bliss and excitement. Then you would never find out what a mature relationship can be.
The Guidance is guiding us all the time. Much of the time, we don’t want to listen and don’t want to recognize it or listen to it. We are busy with all kinds of other things that we think are more important. That is why the more we attune ourselves, the more we are open, and the more we are interested in the truth, the more we will see guidance everywhere.
the Diamond Guidance is the essential nous, the microcosm of the universal nous. It is nothing but the expression in our souls
of the inherent true discriminating knowledge of Being—what I have termed God’s mind. So as we open up to its guidance, it guides us to this universal knowledge, and then guidance is everywhere we look.
It is not merely that a greater sensitivity helps the inquiry by giving it the data we need; the sensitivity is already part of what the inquiry is seeking—the clear, experiential discrimination of what is happening, the truth of our experience. This sensitivity, as well as consciousness and awareness in general, manifests in the various organs of perception. Our sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell are an extension of our consciousness that allows us to be sensitive to experience in general. The more these senses are clarified, the more vivid our experience is, both enhancing inquiry and actualizing the understanding that inquiry is facilitating. However, since we are learning the kind of inquiry that will take us into the depths of our true nature, these organs of perception are not sufficient by themselves, because they are limited capacities. In particular, they are limited by our worldview, our assumptions about reality. We might not know it, but our capacities of seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, sensing, feeling, and touching, and our kinesthetic sense all operate through subtle veils. These veils are our self-image and our perception of the world—which are based on accumulated encrustations from our history. So as our inquiry deepens and becomes more powerful, it will require our ability to sense our experience to become subtler, deeper, and more penetrating. Not only do our physical senses need to become more vivid and intense, but we need to bring in subtler senses as well.
Perception, intelligence, and understanding operate in a simple and natural way to see through intentional doing or conceptual attitudes and positions. Inquiry spontaneously begins to merely understand the intentional doing, as it arises, or the conceptual attitude we perceive we are taking, or the positions we recognize we are trying to hold on to. It just sees these ego manifestations and understands their significance. There is awareness and knowingness without any conceptually directed
The pure perception and understanding of what is actually there in our experience dissolves the subtle movement of the psyche. The Diamond Guidance is present and operational as a natural and spontaneous functioning of intelligence and awareness. The result is a discriminating understanding of what is arising, liberating the display of Being from our opinions. This discriminating understanding appear as the flashes of insight that are inseparable from our intimacy with the qualities of experience. We recognize here the functioning of the Diamond Guidance as spontaneous curiosity, love of the truth, and steadfastness, which together result in the spontaneous unveiling of truth, as both unfoldment and insight. As this continues, the unveiling finally merges into a nondual condition—the natural perfection, which is the lucidity displaying experience. At this point, lucidity and understanding are inseparable, completely unified. There is unity of presence and discriminating awareness, which is a guided, dynamic flow and unfoldment. In this natural state, whenever a position happens to arise, the practice of inquiry is merely the recognition of that position. The simple apprehension of the subtle movement of taking a position annihilates it. In other words, understanding itself will reveal the barrier and annihilate it.
Practice Session: Your Relationship to Direct Knowing Because direct knowing is so fundamental to inquiry, exploring your relationship to direct knowing will be helpful in deepening your process. In what way does direct knowing play a part in your life? What is it like for you to have an intimate, immediate awareness of your experience? Are you aware of any beliefs or attitudes about this kind of knowing in contrast to mental or indirect knowing? Consider something simple such as your experience of your dominant hand. Perform a routine task such as washing the dishes or vacuuming, and as you do
so, take note of how directly you are able to perceive that hand and its actions. To what degree is your immediate experience of your hand filtered through your concepts about what hands are and do? or through your attitudes toward past experiences of doing this particular task? or through judgments you might have about how well you are accomplishing the task? What attitudes support you in having a direct knowing about your hand? How does the relative directness or indirectness of your perceptions affect your overall state?
Because the aspect of basic Knowing implies a complete identity of knowing and being, the experience of it is of deep abiding, total settling in oneself, complete repose in one’s presence. Any agitation, any movement away from oneself, will tend to disconnect us from it. It is complete inner rest, what is referred to in Sanskrit as sahaja-samadhi. There is no agitation in the field of consciousness. There is total repose in presence, by being the presence so completely that we only know that we know through experiencing ourselves as a field of Knowing. The Blue aspect is usually difficult for most people to access because their minds are so busy and their inner consciousness is so agitated.
The Blue aspect arises in the center of the head, just as the Green aspect arises in the center of the chest. From this we can also see that just as the Green is the sensitivity that forms the essence of the heart, the Blue is the consciousness that forms the essence of the mind. This is probably the reason why some Sufis consider the Blue to be connected to the Green, as if they form the two sides of one latifa. Let’s look at this phenomenon of direct knowing experientially. If you pay attention to yourself at this moment, you will see that you are not only aware of your body sensations, you also recognize them. You can recognize when you feel pain or pleasure, you can recognize when there’s relaxation or tension. And you know whether you like or don’t like whatever you are experiencing. So when you pay attention to yourself, what are you experiencing? Knowledge. It’s all knowledge—it’s all knowing. The more precise our discrimination, the more it is possible for us to know. The degree to which we can know each discriminated element in our experience depends upon our development of the Blue essential quality. The integration of this essential quality gives us the capacity to immerse ourselves in any particular experience, to absorb our consciousness in it so much that we are intimately in contact with it in all
The more our capacity for direct knowing becomes precise, specific, and clearly discriminating, the more we are integrating the aspect in its diamond form. Our knowing then becomes more luminous and vivid. But most important, our knowing becomes objective, that is, free of our associations and preferences. Knowing in the Diamond Dimension brings more precision and clarity—and hence certainty—to our knowing. We are more able to discern correctly and know things as they truly are. How else can we recognize truth?
Let’s take an example: Suppose you feel sad. The presence of sadness is an objective fact. To say “I’m sad” is the truth in the moment. However, we might see and explain this phenomenon in different ways depending on our perspective or position. And that perspective will most likely affect the experience of sadness. But the sadness as an element in experience is still an incontrovertible truth.
Truth is more of a heart quality, while Clarity is more of a head quality, but they are both manifestations of Essence. Truth brings Clarity, Clarity reveals Truth. And when the mind and the heart operate together in harmony, we call that understanding. As we become clear, we become more objective. When we are totally clear, we are totally objective. Totally clear also means that we are totally transparent. If we are totally transparent, then there is no ego identity, no positions, for any identification with the ego is an obscuration, a dullness. So clarity brings objectivity. In fact, clarity and objectivity are two ways of looking at the same quality. Objectivity means that there is no subjective bias, while clarity means there is no obscuration. Subjectivity and obscuration are related concepts, but they are not exactly the same.
A person who is realized is one whose experience is always fully clear. That person has full awareness, feeling experience intimately with precise and sharp delineation of its basic knowingness.
Clarity of particulars, of details and patterns, means precision. When the discrimination is precise and exact, the clarity of the patterns and the meaning in these patterns become understanding. In fact, this precision and exactness of experience is itself the recognition of objective truth. In other words, understanding is the intimate discrimination of experience, and discrimination is nothing but clarity and precision. So understanding is nothing but clear, exact, and precise direct knowing of the dynamics of the situation.
The drive toward precision and clarity is the action of the Clear diamond. Experience becomes perfectly clear when the Clear diamond manifests and cuts through the clouds of obscuration with the sword of precision. The sharp edges of the diamond function by cutting through the dullness and vagueness of our obscured experience. The diamond has very sharp facets. When these facets touch our experience, they make us see it in a very clear, precise, sharp way. So the sharp edge of the diamond scepter is the clear, precise and specific perception or understanding. This precision can go quite deep, with increasing subtlety. In some sense, the subtlety itself becomes a matter of greater precision. The more precise our experience, the more it becomes subtle. Perception becomes finer, more subtle, more delicate.
The ego-self constantly recites to itself: “Truth is whatever I happen to be thinking.” Inquiry is a way of actively challenging this smug comfort of believing that what we experience and know is the truth. In doing so, it opens up a space for Being to naturally reveal its truth. We can try to see the truth by doing a yogic practice, such as a concentration technique, because sharp concentration can penetrate to the truth. But that method is not based on the understanding that the truth is revealing itself in whatever is happening in our experience. We don’t need to do anything special in order to reach the ultimate truth; it’s not necessary to practice any particular technique that removes us from or transcends our daily life. We just need to recognize the truth in our ongoing experience. Inquiry is the path of discerning the truth already present in any perception or experience.
The truth reveals itself in all our personal situations, in the world, in everything. Every perception, every experience, has truth in it. So if we simply and sincerely inquire into experience, we will clarify our life, and we will clarify the world for ourselves. But we won’t clarify only what our inner nature is, we will clarify everything, for the whole world is the revelation of this truth. When we discern the world as it is, we recognize that’s it’s really nothing but Being itself manifesting in various forms.
This process of the soul revealing herself more and more through inquiry is also called reading, or reading oneself.
The Essential Identity means the identity with Essence, the identity with Being. It is the true sense of identity. When we feel the Essential Identity, when we’re being it, we feel we are being ourselves truly and authentically. And there’s a sense of identity, a singular sense of “I” that is definitely, uniquely self-existing. You’re there, present as you, without that “you” being defined by any constructed concept.
When we are the Essential Identity, there is effortlessness, lightness, simplicity, and unquestioned preciousness. It is the simplicity of being and recognizing that “Yeah, that’s who and what I am. I’m here.”
It’s like a point of light that lights something up as it goes through it. This lighting up of the various experiences begins to compose a thread. As you follow the thread over time, the picture becomes revealed all the way to the essential aspect of Value. Experience becomes the experience of Value itself. That is the essential point, what the meaning is at the essential level.
Let’s not confuse being specific with being precise. They are not the same. Being precise is a function of the Clear Essence, the Clear diamond. Being specific is a function of the Point. The Point is the most specific essential presence there is. When you experience the Point, you are a singularity, as specific as one can be. There is no more specific experience of Essence than the Point—a one-pointed, singular, concentrated sense of identity and presence. It is the most specific way one can experience oneself. That’s why we say that it is simplicity itself. It has no parts—it’s one thing, very simple, very specific. And because it is the most specific quality, it aids us in being able to be specific about anything. Precision, however, is a matter of exactness, of distinguishing one thing from another.
That is why the Diamond Guidance is a Diamond Dimension, which means an integrated structure. All of the essential aspects are integrated in one functional capacity that operates to reveal the truth of reality. Operating with one of the aspects is still flying our spacecruiser, but it is more like flying a shuttlecraft, while with the whole Diamond Guidance it is as if the mother ship is descending. If you remember the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, you might recall that first the little ships came zooming around, and then the mother ship descended in a symphony of colors and sounds, which was its mode of communicating. This is similar to how the Diamond Guidance functions: it has all the qualities as colored diamonds of conscious presence, and some of them become more brilliant and more intense as they are needed in response to the objective needs of experience.
soul. For inquiry to happen and be guided by the guidance of Being, we need to be intimately in contact with our experience. We need to be intimately in touch with our feelings, sensations, thoughts, impulses, reactions, actions, ideas. We need not only to know they are there, but also to feel their texture. We want to have as much input as possible, which means that we need to be totally immersed in the experience in such a way that we fully experience it and feel it. We need to be completely in the middle of it so that we can feel all its nuances.
The presence of the Diamond Guidance provides all these elements in the inquiry. But for it to arise, there must be a personal involvement, a personal investment, a personal passion. We need to have a personal love for the process, for the exploration, for the truth, for our soul, for reality. Otherwise the Guidance will not show up.
Many people think that autonomy means, “I have my own ideas, my own perceptions,” but that definition is superficial; it is not what essential autonomy really is. Everyone has his or her own ideas and perceptions, but to have one’s own passion, one’s own involvement, one’s own interest, one’s own excitement about the truth and the process of investigation—that is autonomy of inquiry. This autonomy is what invites the guidance of Being. It is okay to be dependent for a while on a school, situation, teaching, or teacher. But our process is not going to get very far if we are not able to self-activate at some point.
So we need to rely on our own pure love, excitement, and passionate involvement in discovering the truth. Our process will not deepen or continue to unfold without this love of the truth, this desire to discover the truth in ourselves. At some point, we ourselves must want to find out about reality because it is personally important to us.
different. This does not mean that we need to like the painful experiences as much as the pleasurable ones. We’re not concerned about loving our experiences, we’re talking about loving the exploration itself—the investigation, the inquiry, the truth.
One thing we find is that ultimate truth is impersonal and transcendent—which means that it exists beyond the realm where the personal is relevant—but it can manifest and express itself in personal ways on various levels, including that of the soul. This possibility points to a different kind of completeness that is still totally real.
How can we understand intelligence on the essential dimension, as a manifestation of Being? We first go to the Absolute, the essence of our Being. The absolute essence of Being is complete in all ways, perfect in all possibilities; it is completeness and perfection in a total way. It implicitly has in it all the essential aspects, all the perfections. These are the perfections of the Absolute, the explications of all the perfections inherent in our deepest nature, which is our absolute identity. All these perfections, all the essential aspects, are implicit in the Absolute. They are not only implicit and unmanifest but also undifferentiated. So the Absolute is completeness, perfect in all ways in an unmanifest, implicit, and undifferentiated state.
Brilliancy is the inherent intelligence of our Being. The more in touch we are with it, the more it penetrates and pervades our life, our perception, our experience, and our actions.
But the presence of the Brilliancy Diamond does more than allow us to discriminate and synthesize simultaneously; it also gives precision to our brilliance and brilliance to our precision. This means that there is sharpness and precision to synthesis. There is an exactness to it. The diamondness gives clarity, precision, and objectivity. What is synthesized are objective facts, objective manifestations.
Inquiry is the practice that constantly reorients us to what is most true in our ongoing experience and then invites us into the vast mysterious realm of that truth. As we come to know this truth as our own presence—the substance of Being and the nature of everything—we are able to see reality more as it truly is. We know what is most real and most important, and that is what guides our life. Inquiry then gives way to simple, natural living. We realize the source of all manifestation, and knowing that, we cannot help seeing all the various manifestations in relation to that source. It is clear that everything is unfolding, everything is luminous.