The Inner Journey Home

Part One Soul

1    Soul or Self

we have discovered the nature of the human being to be a dynamic,

living organism of consciousness, an ever-changing, open, multidimensional field whose experience can come to know and actualize all dimensions of Being.

We can see this in the term soulful, which we normally use to describe someone with a depth of feeling or a sense of inner richness. In other words, to lose one’s soul means to lose contact with the inner depth and richness of being human.

In contemporary life, rather than conceiving of human beings as fundamentally souls, we conceive of them as what we now call self, and this conventional sense of self is one that is normally not so much in contact with its soul; it is a self alienated from the soul’s inner richness and spiritual depth.

The perspective of soul with no self, the sense that the spiritual is distinct and divorced from the psychological, also characterizes some areas of Eastern thought. In Eastern or Western spiritual work, this imbalance manifests as working on spiritual development without taking care of one’s psychological conflicts and aberrations. So one may develop with deep spiritual experience and insight, but retain some neurotic and emotionally conflicted manifestations.

However, psychological understanding shows us that even moral and ethical purification might not be effective in dealing with deep-seated neurosis, or with what is called structural weakness in the ego. Our present understanding of how unconscious beliefs and motivations manifest in distorted attitudes and behavior can help us see how one can be scrupulously devout and moral but at the same time be addictive, abusive, or otherwise psychologically unhealthy.

More than any other factor in our modern life, the dissociation of soul/self from the divine realm or Being and from the world terribly impoverishes us. The transformation of our identity from soul to self has indirectly impoverished our world; robbing us of our spiritual potential, this development left us increasingly identified with and thus dominated by the physical dimension of the self. And the more we experience

ourselves as mainly physical, the more we see our world as fundamentally physical. This view of the world is in most of modern society the prevalent one: the world is simply matter. Rather than inhabiting a comprehensible but ultimately mysterious living world, we inhabit a material universe, explainable only by physical science. The world or cosmos, separate from soul and from God/Being, is only matter. It is a dead world, an inert universe waiting to be explored by our scientific reason.

When the soul is considered to be and experienced as a self, an objectifiable entity whose most fundamental identity is the physical body, we are bound to be materialistic, caring for material well-being, wealth and possessions, security and comfort more than inner depth and fullness.

Materialism is naturally the central philosophic

science is first and foremost a study of matter.

However, the experience of the senses is not what the explorers of Reality in the wisdom traditions call direct experience. In fact, the wisdom traditions of humankind, Eastern and Western, ancient and modern, speak of sense experience as exactly what is immediately present in the way of direct experience. When they speak of direct experience in intuitive knowing or spiritual contemplation, they mean that the mind itself, the medium of knowing, is in direct contact with the object of knowledge. Of course, this kind of knowing is not recognized by our science; its view and method are precisely based on isolating the observer from what is observed. The philosophical position of science—its exclusive reliance on the discursive mind and the physical senses for knowing—cannot be the ultimate arbiter of truth if science is to be integrated with an understanding of the self and of God or Being.

2    Organ of Experience

Our true or spiritual nature does not need work; it is primordially pure and complete. However, we need to work on ourselves in order to become sufficiently open and clear to even glimpse this nature.

When we work on ourselves without knowledge of what the soul is, it is easy to miss the comprehensive, multidimensional, complex, and alive nature of what we are working with. Without knowledge of the soul itself, we would be considering in our inner work parts and fragments of the soul, but would lack the perspective of the

wholeness and totality of the individual. This lack particularly reduces the capacity for working in an integrated and integrative way.

Even though we are always the soul, for the soul is what we are, the direct knowledge of the soul is not so accessible. It is like the water we swim in, while we are thirsty and looking for it. We not only swim in this water; our bodies are largely made of it. In terms of knowing the soul, we have been so identified with being the normal self, the self that has lost awareness of its spiritual ground, that we cannot even envision what it will be like to recognize ourselves as soul.

The direct experience of the soul involves penetrating or bypassing many layers of beliefs and concepts about ourselves and about reality; for most of us the full perception of soul occurs only occasionally, so rarely that most of us do not even comprehend at such times that it is our soul we are experiencing. Therefore, even in a path of inner transformation it is not possible at the beginning to directly recognize the soul. Understanding develops gradually and in stages as one progresses in one’s work.

To understand the first we need to recognize that pure awareness is nonlocal, nondimensional, beyond time and space, and soul is the expression and manifestation of this awareness in our time-space universe. The soul is awareness, but not simply awareness.

This understanding shows that awareness is localized, which is necessary for perception, and under these conditions it is not the body that is responsible for the localization. Under normal circumstances the body and soul are coextensive and hence function together to locate awareness.

In other words, the recognition of soul as individual locus not only leads to differentiating one soul from another,6 but also to the important insight that soul functions as the container of all experiences. The soul is literally the vessel that contains and holds all of our inner events.

When we are finally able to experience the soul directly, we can recognize that she constitutes a medium in which all of our inner events occur, a unified container and vessel that is the very fabric of our subjectivity. We can actually experience her as a sensitive field, a field of consciousness or awareness, where all experiences arise and pass away.

To understand the soul as locus of experience is important for the direct experience and development of the soul. Without this understanding we simply remain in the normal experience of the ego. In this egoic experience there is the experiencer and there is what we experience; the locus is not perceived. Thus, to perceive the locus of experience is to begin to recognize the soul.

Soul, we see here, is basically an organ of experience. We normally think of ourselves as the experiencer of our experiences, but we do not know what this experiencer is. When we recognize the soul, it becomes clear that this experiencer is the same thing as the field where all experience happens. The experiencer is the locus; there is no duality between subject and locus of experience. We also normally think of ourselves as the perceiver of outer objects and events.

Outer manifestations can be seen to be outside the soul but our perception of them occurs within us, within our sensitive interiority, our soul.

The soul is the experiencer, the perceiver, the observer, the doer, the thinker, the chooser, the responder, the enjoyer, the sufferer, and the inner site of all of these.

Since the soul is the experiencer, the fabric and container of experience, and the content of experience, then the experiencer is not separate from this content. The subject of inner experience is the soul, but so is the content, the object of experience. In other words, as we recognize the soul we begin to see the nonduality of subject and object of experience, at least with respect to inner events. For instance, if we consider an emotion that arises in our consciousness, the agent or experiencer of this emotion is not a subject that experiences it as an object, an object separate and different from this subject. The subject is the field and the emotion is a manifestation of this field, in this field. The emotion is nothing but the field itself with a certain manifestation or frequency arising in some region of it. The field is a field of sensitivity, so it is sensitive to this change in frequency or vibration.

For egoic experience, the three are different and separate. The site of the emotion or other experience is not clear, or not perceived at all. The site is experienced generally and vaguely as inside. The object, the emotion in this case, is an event separate and distinct from the experiencer, who is a subject over and above this object. The picture of the soul that we are presenting is actually nothing but a description of the phenomenology of our ordinary experience.

Discerning this sensitivity, we discriminate the field that is the soul, and begin to appreciate the primordial characteristic of the soul, the phenomenological nonduality of its experience.

3    Organism of Consciousness

The soul is a field in this sense, a region of space with particular properties responsive to a specific set of stimuli. The field of the soul is not physical, electromagnetic, or gravitational; rather, it is related to awareness and consciousness. When we recognize the soul we find it to be a locus of consciousness, where this locus is an extended field. The field normally extends through the body, and is often experienced as coextensive with it. However, the field of the soul has no particular shape or size. It is completely formless and amorphous, and can take any shape or form. Depending on the particular state of the soul, this field of consciousness can easily be perceived as bigger, even much bigger, than the body, or it can be perceived to be condensed or contracted into a field smaller than the body. The felt sense of the field of the soul usually takes the shape of the body, largely because the soul identifies herself with the body.

Although this description might sound like something out of the Terminator movies, it is not such a strange idea; most people feel this sort of expansion and contraction and shifting of qualities all the time. When we are happy and secure we tend to feel large, expanded, and light, when frightened or depressed we tend to feel contracted, small, and heavy.

The Holographic Soul

Thus all the properties of the soul are pervasive throughout the field, and her functions can be active at any region of this field. In other words, the soul is holographic—each region, regardless how small, possesses all the properties and capacities characteristic of the soul as a whole. It is not easy to recognize this, but when we do we are on our way to true inner liberation. The liberation of the self or soul involves recognizing the true nature of the self.

Our rigid identities and concepts of self compartmentalize our experience of the soul in such a way that we cannot see how her properties and capacities are available to us regardless of the state of consciousness in which we find ourselves. For example, when we are identified with a self-concept of being stupid, our soul forms into a dull and contracted state. But if we recognize that no region of the soul is devoid of any of her properties, and one such basic property is intelligence, then our identification with such a self-concept loses its rigidity, and we find it easier to access our natural intelligence.

When we refer to the soul as a field of consciousness we mean a medium composed of pure consciousness. The capacity to be conscious of something, in the sense of being able to have an awareness or perception of something, reflects the fact that the soul is first and foremost an organism of consciousness.

In addition to the property of being a field, the other fundamental property of consciousness is that it can be conscious of itself. In other words, we do not need to be conscious of something to be conscious. We can be conscious of consciousness itself; that is, not the property of being conscious but of the field or medium that is consciousness. The experience of pure consciousness is the experience of consciousness without an object. It is simply consciousness directly sensing itself. It is consciousness aware of itself as a field, a field characterized basically by the fact that it is conscious of itself. Imagine you are a fluid, like mercury. Imagine that each atom of this mercury is acutely sensing itself, conscious of itself. Each atom is a ball of excitation, and this excitation is identical with the awareness of this excitation. This excitation, which is awareness of the excitation, is pervasive in the whole fluid. Now imagine that each of these atoms is composed of smaller particles, each of which is an excitation that is identical with the awareness of this excitation.

This experience of pure consciousness is like a quality that is aware only of its quality, like the color blue that itself is a seeing capacity but sees only blue. To recognize the soul is to experience ourselves first and foremost as pure consciousness, as a self-aware medium. The soul is not only this homogeneous medium constituting a field; it is an organism constituted of consciousness, like the body is constituted of protoplasm. Just as the body, even though it consists entirely of protoplasm, is differentiated and organized into various organs, systems, and functions, the soul is also differentiated and organized into various qualities, properties, and faculties.

We brought in the question of structure and organization merely to point out that even though consciousness is the ground and substance of the soul, the organism that is constituted by this consciousness is what is structured; that is, the substance is consciousness, and the form the substance takes is the organization of systems, functions, properties, and qualities.

When we begin to experience consciousness directly, a whole new world opens up. Rather than the normal sense that we are seeing the world as an external object, we begin to perceive the universe from within. The inner journey becomes a journey of discovery that opens us to magnificent, exhilarating inner experiences and perceptions, but also brings our knowledge of the world and of existence into a sharp, clear focus. Inner explorers travel to a world much more exciting and thrilling, much more beautiful and meaningful, much more satisfying and fulfilling, much more amazing and magnificent than any outer explorer will ever behold.

The primary difference between ordinary inner experience and direct knowing of consciousness is that when we discern the inner field that is the soul, we experience it as a presence, independent from and more fundamental than all the content of consciousness and all characteristics of subjective experience.

The presence, the hereness, the beingness of consciousness, is not something extra to consciousness; neither is consciousness an extra property of this presence.

In this recognition, we can know ourselves in our fundamental mode of existence. We begin to see, perhaps for the first time, that what we are is more fundamental than all the content of our experience. We are more fundamental than our

sensations, feelings, emotions, thoughts, images, symbols, ideas, concepts, and so on. We awaken to our essential nature, which is more fundamental and more basic than our body, heart, and mind. We experience the fabric that is ontologically fundamental, necessary for the existence of all that we have taken to be ourselves.

The pure, simple experience of presence is not a matter of insight, intuition, or understanding. It is not an emotion, a feeling, a thought, an image, a vision, an idea, or any content of normal experience.

To be aware of our soul as presence is to be presence. To be presence is to be aware of our beingness. To be aware of our beingness is to simply be. In this state our knowing of ourselves is direct, independent from thinking, imaging, remembering, reasoning, or any mental or perceptual activity. Our positivist science and psychology cannot conceive of this possibility, because they are based on the split that dissociated them from Being, as Heidegger brilliantly demonstrated. The pervasiveness of this split in our culture has conditioned us to believe that knowing can only happen through mental activity, and only through the duality of the subject and object of ordinary experience.

And since consciousness is the very faculty of knowing, the only way we can truly know it is through gnosis. We can only know consciousness purely by being it, by identifying consciousness with consciousness. This is the experience of presence, which we know by being the presence.

The inseparability of consciousness and presence gives us the seed that can grow into a way of knowing that integrates the discursive rational with the mystic and intuitive.

Being is consciousness; it does not have consciousness.

To know presence is a matter of our consciousness seeing itself directly and immediately. We normally look at ourselves, including our consciousness, through the filter of our self-concept and worldview.

To summarize, the field of the soul is subjectively and psychologically consciousness, but phenomenologically this consciousness is presence. Experiencing presence is like taking our normal consciousness (which feels so rarefied that it is practically imperceptible), increasing it greatly, and condensing it. If we keep condensing it, allowing our sensitive consciousness to intensify, it becomes more and more vivid and substantial, until it is more liquid. It is like taking clear transparent light and liquefying it. When the condensation reaches a particular threshold, the consciousness will attain a body, an immaterial substantiality. This condensed consciousness, this sensitive substantiality, is now vastly aware of itself; for it is intimately in contact with itself, instead of being so dispersed that only its function is visible to us. We are always the conscious field of the soul, but now we feel present as presence, because we are here and now, not dispersed through our mental content and spread over external distractions. There is now a fullness, almost a density, but a transparent and light density. This fullness forms a field that pervades and underlies all of our subjective experiences. This fullness is also an intensity of sensitivity, a heightening of consciousness. The sensitivity pervades the whole field, for it is not something additional to it. The fullness is nothing but the condensation of consciousness. The conscious fullness is presence, and we know it because it is consciousness so self-collected it is conscious of its fullness, its presence. It senses itself at each point of its expanse, and it feels itself as presence, as the beingness of consciousness.

heightening of consciousness. The sensitivity pervades the whole field, for it is not something additional to it. The fullness is nothing but the condensation of consciousness. The conscious fullness is presence, and we know it because it is consciousness so self-collected it is conscious of its fullness, its presence.

It senses itself at each point of its expanse, and it feels itself as presence, as the beingness of consciousness.

Presence knows itself directly, without reflecting on itself, and without a self-object dichotomy.

The soul is an organism of consciousness with differentiated properties, faculties, and functions. She can act on and interact with herself and with the environment. An analogy may illustrate this view more clearly. Our physical body is an organism. It is composed of many facets and dimensions. It possesses various organs and systems, each with its specialized functions. It has the dimension of anatomic organs, like the eyes, genitals, and hands. It has the dimension of physiological systems, like those of digestion and circulation.

However, we can see that at a particular level of organization the systems and organs of the body, with their essential fluids, are all differentiations of a basic medium, protoplasm. This original medium is the ground of the body that has differentiated in many ways, becoming finally a complex living organism.

When we think of the soul as analogous to the body, consciousness corresponds to protoplasm. Thus the soul is an organism of consciousness, just as the body is an organism of protoplasm. The consciousness or presence of the soul differentiates itself into many dimensions of increasing complexity and organization. (See appendix B for a discussion of the Yogachara system of consciousness.)

Each dimension possesses many facets, each with specialized functions. All the dimensions and facets are organized holistically and synergistically to function as one organism. This organism is all fundamentally consciousness, but in its differentiated manifestation as soul this consciousness can know itself not only in direct perception of its fundamental nature as consciousness, presence, and Being, but also it can know all of its differentiations and manifestations.

Essence is the essence of the soul, her true nature, which we have seen to be her ontological dimension and ground. Essence is pure consciousness, which is experienced phenomenologically as presence.

These aspects are particular differentiations out of the basic presence, pure consciousness. They are differentiations only in quality, so they always remain as presence. Each aspect is a presence capable of being self-aware, and the only difference from the protoplasmic presence is that this awareness is also an awareness of the particular quality.

In terms of our body analogy, the aspects correspond to the essential fluids and organic compounds of the body. They are like the complex proteins, amino acids, fatty acids, hormones, enzymes, neurotransmitters, and the like, which are all necessary for the growth, health, and full functioning of the body. This is only an introductory discussion of essence and its various aspects, to utilize our analogy, but we will discuss this matter extensively in chapters 5, 8, 10, and 19.

However, the analogy with the body is limited. For the body, the differentiation of protoplasm and the resulting structures of organs and systems, with their functions, are relatively stable and fixed for the duration of one’s life. Not so with the soul; her organization is extremely more plastic than the physical body.

The differentiation and organization are in constant states of shifting, change, and transformation. It is inherent to the soul that no organized structure is fixed, or needs to be fixed. This is partly because the differentiation and organization of dimensions and functions do not develop as stable and localized fixed structures, like the anatomical organs or physiological systems of the body. All the dimensions, facets, and functions of the soul are coextensive with all of her presence, and thus any region of the field of presence possesses all these dimensions and faculties. To know the soul directly we begin to see that our mind is not only in the head. All of the medium of the soul, any part and all parts, has the capacity of mind.

We normally experience mental activities happening in our heads, mostly because of a particular connection between cognition and the brain. This connection does not dictate that mental events happen in the head, but rather that some specialized mental functions require the operation of the brain. We can actually know and contemplate in any part of the body.

In other words, the functions of the soul that directly concern the physical dimension of experience tend to be localized in different and specific parts of the body, but inner events are not necessarily limited to this organization. Dimensions, structures, and functions of the soul are not differentiated and organized once and for all, remaining as structures that can exercise functions when needed. The differentiation and organization happens as need arises for a particular function or capacity. When the need passes away the organization dissolves, or merges into another one that becomes needed for the next experience or task.

Dimensions, structures, and functions of the soul are not differentiated and organized once and for all, remaining as structures that can exercise functions when needed. The differentiation and organization happens as need arises for a particular function or capacity. When the need passes away the organization dissolves, or merges into another one that becomes needed for the next experience or task.

We are not normally aware of this magical show, mostly because we are not in touch with the inner field of presence. We are only aware of the products of the soul’s continuous morphing, as thoughts, images, emotions, and sensations. Appreciating this morphogenic plasticity of our soul allows us to glimpse the promise of freedom inherent in our nature.

Part Two Properties And Functions Of The Soul

4    Noesis

We discussed in Diamond Heart, Book 4, the notion of noetic forms, concepts appearing in awareness that are forms of the manifestation of Reality. Noesis, as we are using it here, is the soul’s capacity to be aware of itself not only as pure awareness, and not only as the content of experience, but to be aware directly of forms arising in the field of consciousness. This capacity for discriminating awareness that is not governed by the alienation of the subject-object view, and that does not separate discriminated content from the field of presence/consciousness in which it is arising, turns out to be a powerful tool for the soul’s realization of its own nature and the nature of Reality. We normally think of knowledge as information stored in the mind, or in a book or a computer or some other place. In ourselves, this stored information is clearly related to past experiences, impressions, and thoughts. In this chapter we will begin to use the word knowledge in a new and somewhat unorthodox way.

Noesis, as we are using it here, is the soul’s capacity to be aware of itself not only as pure awareness, and not only as the content of experience, but to be aware directly of forms arising in the field of consciousness. This capacity for discriminating awareness that is not governed by the alienation of the subject-object view, and that does not separate discriminated content from the field of presence/consciousness in which it is arising, turns out to be a powerful tool for the soul’s realization of its own nature and the nature of Reality. We normally think of knowledge as information stored in the mind, or in a book or a computer or some other place. In ourselves, this stored information is clearly related to past experiences, impressions, and thoughts. In this chapter we will begin to use the word knowledge in a new and somewhat unorthodox way.

Our sensation is knowledge of sensation; our emotion is knowledge of emotion. Our seeing is knowledge, our hearing is knowledge, our thinking about the past, present, and future is knowledge. Our questioning is knowledge. Our sense that we don’t know something is knowledge; we know that we sense that we don’t know. Our wrong beliefs and even inaccurate perceptions are knowledge in this sense. We “know” plenty of things that aren’t true.

Basic knowledge is the knowledge aspect of our actual present experience, while ordinary knowledge is that knowledge that is more formed and qualified by abstractions and memory.

We generally think of perception, even perception of our inner states, as a subject being aware of an object. I am a subject, an “I” or an observer, experiencing something in my chest, abdomen, head, or some other internal place. Let’s say I am feeling a sense of warm kindness in my chest. From the usual perspective, I assume that the

observer is separate from the object of observation, the warm kindness. Often we experience the “I” or observer somewhere in the head or at the back, although we might not notice this sense of location.

However, in the course of many meditative and some philosophical approaches to knowledge, we begin to move from this conventional view, to challenge this assumption of a separate observer. When we say, “I feel compassionate,” or “I have a headache,” or even “I see a dog,” we know we can become clearer about what is this compassion, where in the head it hurts, or what sort of dog we are seeing. But the “I” who is feeling or hurting or seeing is, as we said, usually vague and in the background. We don’t think to ask, what is this “I” who feels or hurts or sees? This is a central element in many paths: beginning to explore what is the location of experience, and to appreciate the field of awareness itself as the ground and medium of perception and experience. Direct recognition of the conscious presence, which is the soul, gives us a new ability to understand our capacity for inner perception. When we recognize that this field is a presence that is ontologically more fundamental than inner content, we understand that the content must be arising within this field. Inner content does not enter consciousness from somewhere else. It arises in the field of consciousness itself, as the field modifying itself at the particular region the content arises. In other words, content arises within the field of consciousness as part of the field. Content is composed of particular forms the consciousness assumes at certain regions of its presence.

We do not see them as forms arising through our inner field of consciousness plastically changing itself to create them out of its very substance. We do not see this process of inner creation because we are not in touch with the field directly, so we end up perceiving only the forms it takes. By coming in touch with the inner field of presence, we have the wonderful opportunity of seeing how our consciousness functions to create its own inner forms.

Noesis versus Pure Perception The first level of pure perception, prior to these two steps, is the level of perception with no discernment, no discrimination at all, simply pure consciousness aware of awareness itself and nothing else. This ground of pure awareness is the fundamental ground spoken of in many spiritual traditions, and is the medium in which all levels of knowing appear. The capacity to discern differences in the field of our awareness is a fundamental element of our consciousness.

So in what we are calling pure perception, associated with what is traditionally called nonconceptual awareness, there is the perception of differences within a field without recognition of those differences. There is awareness that there are different forms, but in pure perception these forms are not discriminated in such a way that they can be recognized or named.

This is consciousness with no mind involved, awareness with no knowing of any kind.

There is awareness of content but no recognition of it; recognition requires a further step in the functioning of consciousness. The traditional metaphor for this pure perceptivity is the mirror. The mirror analogy describes the soul’s primordial and original condition, which is the pure nonconceptual awareness of experience.

A mirror reflects forms without adding anything to them. It merely registers the shapes, colors, and movements of the forms. Our consciousness functions like a mirror with respect to the forms that arise within it. This nonconceptual awareness is fundamental to the soul, a function that underlies and precedes all other functions of consciousness.

This nonconceptual awareness is fundamental to the soul, a function that underlies and precedes all other functions of consciousness.

This ground of nonconceptual awareness that has the capacity for perception is the deepest ground of the field of the soul. It is this ground in which arise the forms of consciousness that constitute the inner experience of the soul.

Our consciousness is like a magical mirror that creates the forms that appear on its surface. A better metaphor is a more modern one: on a television screen, images appear within the screen, and unfold as a series of forms, shapes, colors, and movements that constitute a story in the experience of the viewer. Yet even the television screen is not a perfect metaphor, for our consciousness does not only produce the forms; it also perceives them. If we think of the light in the television screen as consciousness, if we imagine that this light perceives the forms it is projecting, then we come closer to understanding pure nonconceptual awareness.

forms, shapes, colors, and movements that constitute a story in the experience of the viewer. Yet even the television screen is not a perfect metaphor, for our consciousness does not only produce the forms; it also perceives them. If we think of the light in the television screen as consciousness, if we imagine that this light perceives the forms it is projecting, then we come closer to understanding pure nonconceptual awareness.

The Soul as Riemannian Manifold

Viewing our consciousness in terms of its dimensions, we see that it is not a three- or four-dimensional field, but a multidimensional manifold, a manifold in the sense that it is a dynamic structure of dynamic structures. This manifold is characterized by a nonlinear—Riemannian—geometry, in that all the dimensions open up to all the others in nonlinear ways.

We might at the same time be aware of the fundamental presence of Reality and the dynamism of our experience and of everything in Reality. Everything connects with everything else in the soul.

Basic Knowledge

So far we have seen two elements of the soul’s experience: the most fundamental dimension of the soul, nonconceptual awareness, functioning as the bare possibility of perception, and the understanding of this field of awareness as a multidimensional field of sensitivity which is a dynamic nonlinear manifold.

What we are calling “basic knowledge” is the fundamental element of knowingness that is inherent in all our experience. Every experience we have of any sort is knowledge. When a form arises in the soul this form is inseparable from the cognition of this form. The whole experience is nothing but knowledge, composed of knowledge, and dependent upon knowledge. We can easily see this by simply contemplating our experience, any experience and at any time. Our hearing of a sound is the knowledge that we are hearing sound; our knowing that there is hearing and sound, our recognition of the quality of the sound—all these are knowledge.

Every experience we have of any sort is knowledge. When a form arises in the soul this form is inseparable from the cognition of this form. The whole experience is nothing but knowledge, composed of knowledge, and dependent upon knowledge. We can easily see this by simply contemplating our experience, any experience and at any time.

However, we can discriminate two kinds of knowledge in this situation: the present-centered, direct knowingness of the sensations, and the remembered knowledge about them. The former, the direct knowledge that is implicit in all experience and fundamental to the soul, is the basic ground of knowledge; the latter, which we call ordinary knowledge, is a subset of the former.

Every experience is knowledge. Is there an experience of fear that is not the direct knowledge of the fear? Knowledge is the very fabric of experience.

Many thinkers who appreciate the extent to which our experience is constructed by our accumulated knowledge believe that all experience is construction. Those who strongly hold this extreme view assume that the direct knowledge we are discussing is completely formed by ordinary knowledge, mostly at subliminal and unconscious levels. We do not hold this view; we observe that although our ordinary experience is largely constructed through ordinary mind—which accounts for the preponderance of techniques in wisdom teachings which challenge these constructions—it is not completely so.

One category of inherent forms that are seen not to be constructed, for instance, is what we call noetic forms, including what Plato

called Ideas. This question of to what extent the knowledge of the soul is determined by constructions will be discussed further in chapter 18.

Traditional spiritual and philosophical teachings describe the process of realization as waking up to Reality. One sees frequently the simile of seeing through the veils of our ordinary experience being like seeing a rope and thinking that it is a snake, then waking up

Our observation here is that the form of the rope is definitely still there when we are not in the thrall of constructed concepts; we are able to see, and perhaps to recognize, the form, but our perception is not veiled by construction. Even if we have ordinary or constructed knowledge about the rope and what a rope is, the more we are close to basic knowledge, the more the perception is fresh, direct, immediate, and objective. The experience of the soul, then, is not only a field of awareness, not only a field of differentiated but not conceptualized forms; it is also a field of discriminated forms. This is so for both inner and outer events. If we look around and see people, that is knowledge arising in our field of awareness.

We ordinarily do not recognize the forms we are aware of as forms of knowledge, because we take the naïve positivist position that they are objects that we can know. We believe that we are simply perceiving and recognizing objects that are actually there physically, or are passing through our consciousness. From this perspective, for example, an emotion, like fear, is something which is arising and I recognize it, the end result being the cognition of fear. From the perspective we are presenting here, the fear is a form manifesting within the field of consciousness, made out of consciousness. It is an extension of the consciousness, a form that the consciousness presences itself as.

The soul, then, is not simply an organism of consciousness, but is also an organism of knowledge. When we recognize knowledge as the fabric of all experience, we cannot hold on to our habitual dichotomy of experiencer and experienced, knower and known. The knower is knowledge, the known is knowledge. The knower is the field, and the known is a form that this field assumes without ceasing to be the field.

Can we separate the knower in our experience from our knowing of it? Can we separate the known in our experience from our knowing of it? Of course not, for all is knowledge, basic knowledge.

Knowledge contains all experience, including illusion. All of Reality is a field of knowledge, a field that is constantly and continuously morphing itself into forms, shapes, and colors, but these forms only express the knowledge, without ever ceasing to be knowledge.

From Basic Knowledge to Ordinary Knowledge In the normal cognitive process, we abstract certain forms and patterns from the overall unified field of knowledge and retain them in memory. The accumulation of these abstractions is what we ordinarily call knowledge. Our cultural environment largely determines which forms and patterns we focus on, isolate, and abstract. Thus ordinary knowledge is largely culturally determined.

As we stated above, ordinary knowledge is a subset of basic knowledge. It originates in perception and experience, but then forms structures which strongly influence and further structure our moment-to-moment experience. Even ignorance and falsehood are knowledge. When we know we are ignorant of something, this is knowledge. If we are ignorant of something but believe we are not ignorant, this mistaken knowledge, this belief, functions as knowledge in our experience, even though it is false. If we see a rope and believe it is a snake, we respond exactly as if we know it is a snake. Here we are making a distinction between truth and knowledge, again acknowledging that we are using the word knowledge in a particular and unusual way in order to convey the insight that knowledge is an inherent part of the soul’s experience.

The dimension of basic knowledge is a ground for the development of the capacity for thought. As we focus on, delineate, and isolate a particular form in our consciousness we recognize it as a piece of knowledge. Our memory retains this impression as an image, a pattern involving several dimensions in addition to the visual. It includes the cognitive discrimination and whatever inner sense—for example, the kinesthetic sense, the emotions, and the sense of an essential state or space—the original experience had. Concepts form regarding, and words become associated with, some of the simple forms that we retain. Because they arise within the conscious field, these retained forms and their associated concepts and labels are manifestations of basic knowledge. However, the concepts now refer to partial, limited impressions of past experience. These images, symbols, words, and concepts become the basic content of ordinary knowledge. They form the basic blocks for the soul’s capacity to think. Thinking is basically the relating of previously perceived elements of basic knowledge with each other. The original demarcations or boundaries that define concepts, words, and images originate in basic knowledge. Thinking can then become a dimension on its own, by the process of relating these mental elements with each other, in conjunction with further perceptions in present direct experience, or basic knowledge. This new dimension develops to many degrees of abstraction; we abstract from the original abstractions, and create new concepts and symbols that relate to the relationships of the original abstractions, and to groups of them. This process develops many degrees of differentiation and integration, in an evolving spiral of self-organization. The original plasticity of the soul manifests now on this dimension in a much freer way than we know in direct experience. The use of thought in imagination makes it possible, for instance, to theoretically solve practical problems, like building a bridge, for example. It makes possible all kinds of creative work, such as music and literature, and makes it possible for us to consider the past and the future. Emphasis on rational thought has led to many advances in our practical life, but when it occurs without direct experience of the field of consciousness, it contributes to the loss of the fabric unifying the basic triad. Although discursive knowledge is a subset of basic knowledge, it does not include some very important dimensions of consciousness. The more abstract it becomes, the less of the inner sensory dimensions it includes, until it is constituted only by the mental knowing dimension, a cognition that relies only on representational concepts and words. The most important dimension it loses touch with is that of pure consciousness; it loses most of the sensitive presence of consciousness. It becomes a disembodied knowing, where only the outlines of the forms of experience remain, and their interrelationships.…

Although discursive knowledge is a subset of basic knowledge, it does not include some very important dimensions of consciousness. The more abstract it becomes, the less of the inner sensory dimensions it includes, until it is constituted only by the mental knowing dimension, a cognition that relies only on representational concepts and words. The most important dimension it loses touch with is that of pure consciousness; it loses most of the sensitive presence of consciousness.

Basic knowledge is being and discrimination at the same time. Discursive knowledge develops by emphasizing the discrimination aspect of basic knowledge, while mystical knowledge emphasizes the direct feel and touch of basic knowledge. It focuses on its Being side. In reality, basic knowledge is gnosis—the common word for direct knowledge of Reality—especially when it is not patterned by ordinary knowledge. Gnosis can possess degrees of discrimination, depending on how much we focus on the discriminating outlines in the field of knowledge. The less we focus on these demarcations and the more we are immersed in the direct feel of the field, the more that gnosis will be mysterious, intuitive, even vague and indiscernible. Gnosis can be divested of its discriminating characteristics such that only a bare minimum remains; this involves deep, direct experience, usually without the capacity to say much about it. This movement toward knowledge without discrimination goes as far as total mystery, where we are touched deeply, totally immersed in the depth of awareness with no content, or even with no sense of awareness.

Discursive knowledge develops by emphasizing the discrimination aspect of basic knowledge, while mystical knowledge emphasizes the direct feel and touch of basic knowledge. It focuses on its Being side. In reality, basic knowledge is gnosis—the common word for direct knowledge of Reality—especially when it is not patterned by ordinary knowledge. Gnosis can possess degrees of discrimination, depending on how much we focus on the discriminating outlines in the field of knowledge. The less we focus on these demarcations and the more we are immersed in the direct feel of the field, the more that gnosis will be mysterious, intuitive, even vague and indiscernible. Gnosis can be divested of its discriminating characteristics such that only a bare minimum remains; this involves deep, direct experience, usually without the capacity to say much about it. This movement toward knowledge without discrimination goes as far as total mystery, where we are touched deeply, totally immersed in the depth of awareness with no content, or even with no sense of awareness.

Recognizing how thought, reason, and logic on the one hand, and mystical revelations and spiritual transcendence on the other, are both related to basic knowledge can help us move toward a new integration of knowledge. We have the possibility of recognizing the ground that unifies mystical perception with rational thought, a unification that is not simply an addition or sequential application, but a coemergent operation.

And since reason here is not dissociated from its ground, the presence of consciousness, it becomes a tremendous aid in investigating experience and perception and leading us toward new and more harmonious knowledge. Applying rational thought to direct experience can become a more balanced and complete method of scientific investigation.

Science inquires into the surface manifestations of basic knowledge—its horizontal dimension, so to speak—and spirituality inquires into its depths—its vertical dimension. Each arrives at detailed, extensive, and useful knowledge. Both attempt to discover basic knowledge that is uninfluenced by opinions or projections, or determined by prior constructions. By exploring the wholeness of basic knowledge—both the vertical and horizontal dimensions—we may be able to arrive at a more fundamental dimension of knowledge that embraces both. The important point here, however, is that when we explore the forms of basic knowledge it reveals to us its truths, its invariant patterns and universal principles.

Let us imagine that we are in a completely dark room, a room full of all kinds of objects. There is a light source in this room, with a dimmer switch that can be turned up or down. We are also wearing clear eyeglasses with shutters of different colors. The colored glass of each shutter has some transparent designs painted on it. We begin to slightly turn the light on, by sliding the dimmer slowly, to the dimmest illumination. We begin to see the vaguest outlines of some of the objects in the room. This is the beginning of basic knowledge. We see what is actually there but we see only dim outlines with and within shadows. We may mistake what we see, for we still cannot differentiate the shadows from the real objects. We have also the complicating factor of wearing the multi-shuttered glasses. Our knowledge here, then, is incomplete because of the dim light and distorted by the colors and designs of the shuttered glasses. But all of what we see is knowledge, nothing but knowledge. We turn the dimmer up slowly and steadily, and every once in a while remove one of the shutters on our glasses. Basic knowledge increases steadily, becoming more full, and more accurate. Each time we remove one of the shutters we are surprised by what we see, amazed how wrong our assumptions were, or how accurate were our intuitions. These are the insights and satoris, the quantum leaps in knowledge. As we keep turning the dimmer up and removing shutters and seeing more, the more clearly and objectively we see, and the more we know. Our knowledge is steadily becoming both complete and objective, both full and truthful. When the light is completely turned on, and we have removed our glasses, we see everything just as it is.

the complicating factor of wearing the multi-shuttered glasses. Our knowledge here, then, is incomplete because of the dim light and distorted by the colors and designs of the shuttered glasses. But all of what we see is knowledge, nothing but knowledge. We turn the dimmer up slowly and steadily, and every once in a while remove one of the shutters on our glasses. Basic knowledge increases steadily, becoming more full, and more accurate. Each time we remove one of the shutters we are surprised by what we see, amazed how wrong our assumptions were, or how accurate were our intuitions. These are the insights and satoris, the quantum leaps in knowledge. As we keep turning the dimmer up and removing shutters and seeing more, the more clearly and objectively we see, and the more we know. Our knowledge is steadily becoming both complete and objective, both full and truthful. When the light is completely turned on, and we have removed our glasses, we see everything just as it is.

The soul experiences herself as a presence aware of its presence, with an awareness inseparable from and coemergent with presence. Simultaneously with this awareness of presence there is, inseparable from and coemergent with this awareness, the recognition of this presence as knowledge. It is like a medium, such as a perfumed oil, made out of knowledge. It is as if the atoms of the oil are knowledge. It is both the capacity of cognition, the faculty of knowing, and the presence of knowledge itself. This is similar to our understanding of consciousness, in which we see that the presence of pure consciousness is both a medium of sensitivity and, because of that, the capacity to be conscious of something. What we are pointing out here is that one of the specific ways of experiencing the soul is as an infinite, ever-flowing fountain of knowledge.

Pure knowledge is like the experience of holding a book and feeling, “This is knowledge,” without opening the book and seeing what the specifics of the knowledge are. We just know, “This is knowledge.” This is a very specific feeling, a specific taste that tastes like knowledge. It is easy to become flabbergasted with this sense of knowledge, and with the sense of infinity of knowledge, of the infinite potential of knowledge.

It is like looking through a telescope into the night sky. At the beginning we see few stars; when we increase the magnification we begin to see that these stars extend infinitely, more and more of them, as far as any magnification can allow. We become humbled by our potential; we see how we have always been scratching the surface of Reality.

The experience here is of the conscious presence characterized by potentiality. The presence is the presence of potential. Just as potential knowledge is the presence of pure knowledge, potential is the presence of pure potential, as a category on its own, as a fundamental quality that we experience here explicitly and directly. We experience ourselves as pure potentiality. We do not experience ourselves as having potential; we experience ourselves as potential. We are the potential for all experience, all perception, all knowledge, all qualities, all capacities, all functions, all processes, and all developments. In this experience we do not surmise that we are potential; we know we are potential by being potential. Our presence is the presence of potentiality.

We also have the sense that the awareness or aliveness of each of these atoms can develop and multiply in various and infinite ways. There is an exploding sense, an unfolding sense, for each little part of it, each infinitesimal region in the field. Yet the field is not composed of discrete atoms. It is a continuous unified medium. It is a very dynamic, seething, pulsing medium, with an endless possibility of unfoldment, expansion, and experience. It is like experiencing ourselves as the seed, rather than the tree.

We all have the same potential, which is the potential of humanity. Practically speaking, however, we are different in terms of how accessible it is to us. This depends on our environment, our circumstances, our history, our times and culture, our physical constitution, and many other factors. Our environment, including our bodies, may constrain us, not only by putting up barriers and difficulties in the way of our potential, but also in not eliciting our potential by providing the opportunities and the supports we need.

In the experience we are discussing, the particular elements of potential are not manifest, not developed yet, but we are directly aware of the immensity of the treasures within, the infinite energy, power, knowledge, insight, development, and so on. There is a sense of infinity, limitlessness. It is not possible to conceive of the totality of what is possible for the human soul. It is infinite. That is why our knowledge and understanding about the soul is bound to be partial and incomplete. As a result, each spiritual tradition has some knowledge and wisdom about the soul. None is complete. They are not identical in their understanding, and they will disagree about many things regarding soul.

Different traditions explore different properties, capacities, and dimensions of the soul. The emphases vary greatly, but this does not mean that some are right and some wrong.

Essential Potential

The central and most important potential of the soul is her essence, for essence in its various aspects and dimensions forms the ground and provides the Platonic forms for all of our higher states of consciousness, and the higher faculties of experience and action.

Essence, hence, can be considered the deepest potential of the soul, her spiritual potential, the richness of her depth. Essence, therefore, does not have potential the way the soul does. Potential is a quality and characteristic of the soul, and hence soul is always growing and developing. We cannot say the same about essence, which is primordially pure and complete; our realization and understanding of it grows and develops, but this does not mean essence does. Essence is always pure, eternally immaculate, everlastingly perfect. This is the reason why many wisdom traditions speak of realization as recognizing the inherent perfection of Reality. Our true nature is primordially pure, complete; it does not need to develop or be clarified. This can lead, and has led, to much confusion about the inner journey, whether it is the discovery of a primordial perfection or the process of perfection. This also resulted in the conceptual dichotomy of gradual and sudden paths of enlightenment.

Realizing her essential nature she is enlightened. Her essence is her deepest and most central potential, but it is a particular potential, one of the elements that constitute her potential. Essence does not have potential,…

By realizing and actualizing essence the soul is enlightened, but this does not mean she has no more potential to actualize. Her potential is infinite, in terms of forms of experience, capacities, functions, knowledge, contribution, action, and so on. The realization of essence, however, throws the soul wide open for the development of her potential. There are then no inner inhibitions to the arising and development of her potentialities, but this development depends on actual and particular needs felt by oneself and others. It depends on opportunities and situations in life. The soul can develop before enlightenment, by actualizing many of her potentials, as we see in the actualization of creative and intellectual potentials. Spiritual realization is not the only development, and does not imply or guarantee other kinds of development. Realized individuals, as a result, can be developed in various ways and on many levels in relation to the various human potentials. However, the soul’s freedom and the fulfillment of her deepest longings depend on the realization of her essential potential. Only with the actualization of essence can the soul be free, completely authentic and totally serene. Essence is her true nature, without which she is estranged, lost, inauthentic, empty, and twisted. Regardless how much of her potential she actualizes, regardless how much a genius she becomes, artistically or…

HOW DOES THE POTENTIALITY INHERENT to the soul become actuality? How does potential for experience become experience?

We generally believe that we know how experiences arise; we assume that they are responses of our nervous system to stimuli. When our stomach is empty for a period of time, a signal goes to our lower brain, which interprets it with the result of the feeling of hunger arising. When we lose someone important to us, our brain registers the loss in the limbic system that then activates certain hormonal and neuronal processes in our viscera, and a feeling of sadness arises. We read an article about a subject that interests us; our neocortex registers the ideas and images, and responds with a new flurry of brain activity that results in new images and strings of thoughts. It is all orderly, mechanical, and cybernetic. While this is a valid view of experience, corroborated by physical observation and experiment, it is one side of a complementary phenomenon. It does not explain the whole phenomenon and does not account for many of our subtle perceptions.

In this chapter we will focus on the inner mechanism that leads to the arising of inner forms and events, whether or not they are in relation to external stimuli.

Changeability

This is why some see the soul as a chameleon, transforming from one condition to another. This points to an important property of the soul, related to its potential: its changeability.

Even though we have an overall sense of self, this sense is composed of constituent sub–self-images, as object relations theory has shown. These component self-images arise and dominate our identity, depending on situations and events. At one moment your sense of yourself might be an adult, then a few minutes later you might feel like a little child, unreasonable and demanding. One moment we are loving humans and a few minutes later we might be hateful monsters. These incessant shifts in self-image account for much of the changes in our states, our mental and emotional conditions.

Flow

Our consciousness is generally so focused on the particulars of present experience that we are not aware of the flow of the forms. So we see two factors that predispose us toward an atomistic way of viewing our experience: first, our identification with the relatively unchanging self-concept, and second, absorption in the content of experience. We are aware of the atoms of our experience, the particular atom that happens to be the specific experience, but not aware of the stream of atoms constantly passing through. If

we disengage slightly from the specifics of the experience we can see that there is a stream of experiences, a flow of impressions.

We normally focus on the forms, one form after another, and are unaware of the substratum, the medium that is flowing and transforming. If we disengage from the focus on the specific forms and experiences, and simply observe them coming and going, we might become aware of the phenomenon of streaming, the sense of flow. This phenomenon of streaming and sense of flow is not merely the experience of various states happening one after the other. Sometimes, for example in sitting meditation, we might observe experiences flow one after the other, and we call that streaming.

The presence is not rigid; it is not a fixed mirror that reflects passing forms. It is not like a static screen that displays the projected images of a movie projector. It is more like the light that streams out of the projector, a fluid presence.

The soul is a fluid, alive substance—not a material substance, but a substantial presence. The change and succession of experiences are felt now as flow, the flow of this presence, as a river that bubbles and spatters, producing various forms we call experiences.

The experience of soul as flow possesses many degrees of subtlety, each reflecting a particular depth of this experience. At the beginning, we experience flow topographically, similar to the flow of a stream of water. We experience the medium of the soul as a fluid that flows through our body. We experience it as streaming from one part of the body to another, as in the flow of energy up the spine. We might be aware that the flow is faster in some areas than others, more sluggish in some regions, more blocked in others, completely stuck or absent, or free and smooth.

When we are directly experiencing the flow of the soul in our activity, we feel we are flowing, not hampered, not stuck. Our energy is unified, our mind focused, and our body moves in an integrated, fluid, and smooth fashion. We are completely involved in whatever we are doing, whether it is physical activity, artistic creativity, dancing, social activity, lovemaking, hiking, swimming, painting, writing poetry, playing music, or even the free flow of insights and knowledge. The central feeling is the sense of freedom and release, the experience of spontaneity and pleasurable absence of control. It is usually an exhilarating and thrilling ride. Our minds and bodies are unified in this experience, synchronized and harmonized, so we tend to function and perform smoothly and easily. And our performance might actually be superior to other times. Athletes, artists, writers and, others familiar with this condition tend actively to seek it. Even though this is an experience of the flow of the soul, we do not necessarily recognize the soul through this experience. This experience of flow normally appears to us as

one kind of experience, and not as the flow of experiences. It is actually a flow of experiences, for our experience is constantly changing its form and inner pattern.

Our potential is literally flowing out, and our consciousness is a fountain of impressions, perceptions, insights, and realizations. We not only have occasional deep experiences of our spiritual depth and nature, but our experience of our soul is a continuous outflow of many new and fresh realizations and perceptions. Our soul is manifesting her inner treasures continually, in an ever-fresh stream of new discoveries; our life is not merely punctuated by deep perceptions and significant experiences and insights, but is more the flow of these significant and deep perceptions and insights. This flow is the inner core of our life, the very substance of our immediate experience.

Unfolding Experiencing the soul as a bubbling stream brings us closer to understanding how our experience occurs, how potential becomes actuality. When our potential is streaming out freely it discloses, as part of this flow, how it manifests into actual experience. The sense of a bubbling or shooting fountain indicates a movement out, a displacement from the inside out, or from the depth to the surface. It is felt as a displacement of a fluid, vertical instead of horizontal.

Experiencing the soul as a bubbling stream brings us closer to understanding how our experience occurs, how potential becomes actuality. When our potential is streaming out freely it discloses, as part of this flow, how it manifests into actual experience. The sense of a bubbling or shooting fountain indicates a movement out, a displacement from the inside out, or from the depth to the surface. It is felt as a displacement of a fluid, vertical instead of horizontal. This is the experienced sense of flow, conveying the impression of a hidden potential that is making itself apparent, as if it is coming out of hiding and exposing itself to the light of experience. This impression is accurate, but still not completely objective. This experience of flow is the beginning of the disclosing of the actual mechanism of manifestation. We can glimpse this mechanism by contemplating the experience of the out-flowing fountain of perception.

When we inquire into this outflow we may see that there is no displacement of fluid or substance from depth to surface. (This perception might also occur spontaneously.) There is actually no displacement of anything; the sense of flow appears because we are not yet completely abiding in the conscious presence itself. The center of our experience remains mostly at its surface, which is constantly changing and transforming, which gives us the impression of flow. When we are fully the presence itself we recognize that the forms appear not because they emerge from deep underneath and bubble up to the surface. Rather, the field of presence itself opens up and reveals another layer to itself. The process of uncurling, unfurling, and opening up is often experienced as a sense or image of an overflowing fountain. This is similar to a rose opening up as each petal uncurls and spreads out, all at the same location.

The closest phenomenon to this perception is the changing picture on a movie screen. The light itself changes in terms of its streaming oscillations, and as a result the projected picture changes. When we see a dog running across the screen, we know that there is actually nothing running across the screen. The image of the dog does not move around because the light moves around; rather the light simply transforms at each point of the expanse of the screen, and the unfoldment of this change gives us the impression of a dog moving across the screen. In other words, the unfoldment of the soul is a matter of the medium of the soul unfolding globally, at each point and region of its expanse.

More precisely, each location of the field of the soul changes its wave characteristics, modifies its vibrational qualities, to transform one experiential form to another. These field-pervasive changes are reflected in the transformation of color, texture, viscosity, density, shape, luminosity, and so on. The subjective sense is that of an unfolding field, of a nonspatial movement. We feel this process as an opening up, an unwrapping, a displaying, a disclosing, a divulging, an unveiling, a revealing, a movement from nonmanifestation to manifestation, from potentiality to actuality.

We may experience the opening up of all the points of the field as a process of appearing and disappearing. One form mysteriously disappears as another form appears and takes its place. There is no origin of what appears and no destination for what disappears. It is like appearing from thin air and disappearing back into it. There is a stream of these acts of appearing and disappearing, giving us the impression of flow and unfoldment. This perception involves experiencing the consciousness of the soul from the dimension of emptiness, where the forms appear from and disappear into emptiness. And since emptiness is not an object, it is neither a source nor a destination. The forms merely move from nonmanifestation to manifestation.

We are not ordinarily aware of this process of continual appearing, because we conceive of the flow of forms and events as occurring in time. We view it as a succession in linear time; this emotion followed by this feeling, then followed by this thought, then by this state, and so on. If we do not look at the experience of flow within the concept of time, as a succession of forms in linear time, we may realize it is basically a manifestation from nothing to something; it just keeps appearing. We can see manifestation then as self-arising, arising without a source.

Lest we think morphogenic transformation is a process in time, we need to remember that it is actually a process of manifestation out of nonmanifestation. We experience it as a transforming field, but the transformation is basically a continual appearing, a magical display of potential into actuality.

We can also experience this dynamism directly, as a pure quality, independent of its ways of expressing itself. This experience of the soul indicates that we are experiencing the soul herself, not only one of her forms. We can experience ourselves not only as a field of consciousness, but as an organism of consciousness, with an organismic sense of presence. We feel ourselves as a writhing, moving, pulsating, convulsing organism. The presence is full of pulsating energy, exploding power, dynamic momentum. The sense of writhing movement and convulsing activity is similar to how a healthy muscle feels when contracting and flexing. It is like the feeling of our body when it is full of life and vigor, and is moving in a robust, powerful way, as during intense exercise. The soul also feels both organismic and orgiastic the way genitals can feel during lovemaking, especially the pulsating movement and flow at the peak of orgasm. In the experience of dynamism there is fullness, robustness, power, energy, aliveness, movement, flow, but all as one integrated movement or action. There is a complete flexibility and flow to the movement, like a jellyfish moving in water.

We can also experience our dynamism as the very substance of the soul being made out of a medium that is scintillating, exploding with life and consciousness. It feels like a pulsating, breathing medium, glowing with life and energy. It actually feels it

This dynamic fundamental dimension of the soul is the basic property, the inherent force that impels her toward manifestation. This dynamic pulsating quality to our consciousness appears to us as a flow, as the unfoldment of our potential. This dynamism is the intrinsic energy and power that makes it possible for our soul to manifest her hidden potential, to create her forms. It is a creative dynamism, literally generating her forms of experience by metamorphosing her very presence. It manifests the forms of all of our experiences through a morphogenic transformation of her very substance. In this morphogenic transubstantiation she expresses her excitatory pulsation, her motile dynamism. This dynamism generates forms through morphing.

The malleability of the soul allows her to be affected by her perception and inner experience, and this effect can be lasting. This phenomenon is everyone’s common experience; it is a normal part of being human, and more basically part of being alive. Here, however, we are exploring exactly how this happens. We want to understand the basic properties of the soul responsible not only for her being affected, but also for her retaining such effects.

Our impressionability is both our boon and our misfortune. We are beings who can soar to unimaginable heights of freedom, creativity, and development, but can also plummet to the depths of suffering and degradation. We can be higher and finer than the highest angels, but can also be lower and more brutish than any animal or devil.

The property of impressionability is absent in essence, whose qualities are timeless and unchangeable. When we experience and understand essence, in any of its qualities and dimensions, one of the primary things we learn about it is its immutability, its spontaneously and primordially given properties, and hence its incorruptibility. It is not only pure; this purity is eternal and stainless, totally immune to the accidents of time. It simply does not make sense for essence to be corrupted or contaminated. In this regard essence is like space. Regardless what arises in space, space remains the same, totally pure and empty. This is why essence does not develop, while the soul does. Essence is timelessly perfect and free, while the soul has the potential for perfection and freedom. This potential is given to her by essence, which is her ontological ground and her timeless and absolutely precious potential. Through realizing and embodying her essential ground, the soul achieves her liberation and fulfillment.

The property of impressionability is what gives our human consciousness its quality of receptivity. The soul has to be receptive to stimuli, both outer and inner, in order for her to be impressed by them. As we discussed in chapter 3, the soul is also agency. She can be responsive and proactive. Here we see the opposite property, that of receptivity. Being necessary for perception and communication, receptivity is an obvious requirement for learning. However, the receptivity of the soul is not like that of a mirror. It is a dynamic receptivity, both because the soul can respond to stimuli and

The soul, then, is basically receptive, to both external and internal impacts. These impacts appear in the soul as forms of experience, and they also structure her by engendering further forms, some of which are lasting. Seeing an external object, for instance, will register in the soul as the image of this object, but this normally leads to the arising of further forms, in the form of associations to and feelings about this image. In other words, these impacts structure the experience of the soul, momentarily or in lasting ways. One of the phenomena that impacts the soul and structures her experience is essence, which is the most important element for her spiritual transformation. Essence is one of the soul’s inner resources; others include the forms of her phylogenetic history, and her capacities, knowledge, memory, and so on. The soul’s receptivity, especially when seen in terms of essence’s active relation to her, is the reason that traditionally the soul is given the feminine gender. Traditionally, soul is seen as feminine and essence masculine. When receptivity is thought of as a feminine property, this attribution makes sense. In fact, some religious teachings—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, for example—take the view that the soul needs to become feminine in relation to essence, spirit, or God, in order to achieve her fulfillment and liberation. To attain completeness, she needs to be receptive to essence, rather than either being active toward it or receptive to the influences of the world. This perspective means that soul needs to be receptive to the influence of essence for the latter to structure her experience, which will allow the soul’s experience to be formed by the dimension that is inherently perfect and free. We will discuss this in greater detail when we explore the development and maturation of soul in chapter 15.4

The soul’s retained impressions can also be disharmonious or even antithetical to her true nature, limiting or distorting her openness, creativity, flow, flexibility, and freedom. The retained impressions can become rigid and fixed structures, limiting her capacity for morphogenic transformation by constraining her malleability and her receptivity to the rest of her potential. Rigidity and fixation are elements of a larger category of disharmonious impressions: retained impressions that are disharmonious to her because they are false, inaccurate, and/or distorted reflections of her nature and properties. Distorted impressions create in the soul an opaqueness that obscures her inherent potential for luminosity, blocking the transparency of consciousness.

Fixed, rigid, and inaccurate impressions constrain the soul’s receptivity to her potential to be prejudiced exclusively toward the elements of this potential that are consonant with the rigidity, fixation, and falseness. The soul has the potential to be false, to manifest rigid and fixed forms, opaqueness, dullness, and darkness. When the retained impressions are such they will tend to channel her creativity and unfoldment of potential toward the elements of this potential that are compatible with these limited and distorted impressions. This is the problem with fixed and rigid impressions, and the forms that do not reflect faithfully her essential nature.

The soul normally grows with a mixture of limited and wholesome impressions in various proportions, depending on the circumstances and environment in which she grows. The result is various degrees of actualization of potential, and various degrees of openness to such potential. Therefore, when a soul begins to feel the desire for expanded and truer experience, it becomes the task of the wisdom teachings to guide the soul to learn to shed her constraining retained impressions and influences, and to know her true nature and basic properties in a way that allows her to be open to the fullness of her potential.

Conditioning is the establishment of rigid and fixed structuralizing impressions in the soul, while learning means greater actualization of potential in response to experiences of internal and external environments. We will see in upcoming chapters that the two are not clearly demarcated, and that they can flow into each other. Developmental psychoanalytic psychology notes that ego defenses are frequently utilized to safeguard and further development, and that some of them lose their defensive functions at particular junctures in ego development and become elements of structures that support adaptation.

We will see in chapters 11 and 14 that ego development, in particular, is largely the establishing in the soul of relatively stable structures, through the integration of myriad retained impressions.

Thus, ego development occurs mostly through the establishment of relatively fixed impressions. Furthermore, because ego development culminates in the establishment of an identity and sense of self that depend on the fixed impressions, it naturally leads to a limitation on our malleability and impressionability; dependence on the fixed impressions orients us toward identification with and attachment to them. We tend to perpetuate our self and its identity, limiting our openness, malleability, and impressionability. We generally experience as threatening and destabilizing the impacts of forms of experience outside the boundaries of our identity. In other words, we become both habituated and attached to the fixed impressions that compose our identity, at the expense of our basic capacities of openness, malleability, and impressionability.

As a consequence, we begin to regard complete openness and impressionability as undesirable, even threatening and dangerous. We unconsciously defend against it regardless of how much we understand its value and significance. This resistance is an attempt to protect our sense of identity. In resisting openness and impressionability, we unconsciously believe that we are fighting for our own personal survival and integrity. This becomes one of the primary difficulties in the process of inner work where we need to be open to new and novel elements of our potential. In fact, in order to be able to be receptive and impressionable to our essence, we need to be completely impressionable, for any limitation in impressionability will become a limitation in our receptivity to the true nature and ground of the soul. This is because our true nature is characterized by complete transparency, luminosity, and flow, and any opaqueness or rigidity is bound to limit our openness to it.

For the soul to let go of her rigidity means not only surrendering her defenses and protective strategies, but also the ego structures that give her the sense of self and identity. She feels that she will be naked, unprotected, and vulnerable.

The need for control of one’s life, experience, inner process, relationships, etc. Rigidity in structure and character. Rigidity can be a way of not allowing oneself to be influenced, not allowing what one considers external influences to affect one. Rigidity may be evident in inner psychological states, religious convictions, ideological positions, and political opinions, as well as in other attitudes, tastes, and preferences. Willfulness, an active way of being rigid and having control. Control can be both passive and aggressive. The general schizoid defenses of isolation and withdrawal. Schizoid defenses are utilized when we want to protect ourselves against vulnerability in general. If we are withdrawn, isolated, out of contact, or emotionally hidden, we believe we are not accessible to influences. Deep inside we may feel vulnerable, so delicate that anything can impress on our soul without our volition. Sometimes the delicacy can be extreme; some people are so vulnerable and so sensitive that you say one word and they lose their sense of themselves. Compulsive need for autonomy. The need for autonomy, to be who one is independent from others, can become so compulsive and obsessive that one always wants to be independent and autonomous, always different. This compulsive need for autonomy can militate against receptivity and impressionability, even though these properties are necessary for the soul to realize her essential nature that alone can give her true autonomy. In other words, by protecting oneself against influence, one becomes closed to the influence of one’s own deepest potentials.

A central component of the spiritual development of the soul relates to freeing her impressionability and receptivity so that she becomes resilient and malleable, as is her nature, but within a particular orientation. She becomes less impressionable to the external and more impressionable to the internal. The receptivity never ceases; it is a property of the soul. In normal experience she is receptive to the world and its impacts in ways usually leading to the loss of her freedom, but she can attain inner autonomy by becoming more receptive to her inner nature, essence, or spirit. More accurately, external stimuli will continue to impact her, but will leave fewer or no lasting traces, and this way her forms of experience will be more structured by her own true potential. External impacts will have a determining effect in terms of what forms emerge, but not in lasting and fixed structures that impede her flow and unfoldment.

This brings us to the question of the impressionability of the soul in infancy, and how it is different from that in her maturity, when she is completed by the realization of her essential and true nature. The soul is completely impressionable at both infancy and full maturity, but in different ways. At infancy the impressionability can and normally does lead to inflexible and relatively permanent forms and structures in the field of the soul. The soul is not only impressionable but these impressions can remain as semi-permanent traces, as indelible impressions. The impressionability of maturity, when the soul is not only complete but has realized her true nature, is pure receptivity and malleability without the possibility of lasting traces. The soul is vulnerable in the sense of being open to all possible forms of her potential experience, but is actually invulnerable in terms of conditioning.

Her impressions are momentary, transitory, and last only as needed for the moment. This condition of liberated impressionability is likened to the effect of drawing on water. The medium of water is quite flexible and impressionable, and readily takes whatever form we impress on it. But this form dissipates almost as immediately as it appears. Another image is that of making circles of smoke in air, as with a cigarette. The form of smoke circle exists only for a short period of time, and the medium of air gradually but quickly regains it original nature. This realized impressionability is given to the soul by her essential nature, which is primordially immaculate and unchangeable. In the liberated state, the essential ground of the soul is now so fully and securely wedded to her that she possesses its incorruptible characteristics. She is still receptive, malleable, and impressionable, but this property is wedded to the immaculate and stainless character of her essence. This transforms the field of the soul into a medium similar to water or space, where it is in some way completely open, receptive, and vulnerable, but at the same time free and spontaneously self-liberating.

The Point of Existence is a study of self-realization, and the process by which the soul attains it by learning to recognize her essence as her identity.

Self-realization of true nature and the ontological autonomy it gives the soul in her individuation both contribute to the development of self-liberating impressionability. Both of these attainments require the purification of the soul, a process by which the soul learns to be transparent to true nature, necessitating that she harmonize the various elements of her potential. The most significant and difficult part of this process is the integration and harmonizing of the spiritual and essential ground with the animal potential of the soul, with its instincts, drives, and desires. This is necessarily a brief outline of the development of impressionability; the various materials that we have introduced into this discussion will become clearer and more precise as we continue our exploration in the present book.

This unfoldment of forms progresses in an evolutionary manner, disclosing and actualizing our potential. It is not a chaotic or haphazard throwing out of elements of potential. This unfoldment usually involves patterns of self-organization. The soul continues to be an organism of consciousness, but her forms steadily move toward higher

levels of organization. New elements of potential arise, new forms of experience and structure appear, and all of these continue to be organized into new structures. As the soul unfolds her potential she changes not by disposing of the old forms, but by integrating them into a more complex organization, in which more elements and levels are integrated into a functional whole. As forms emerge and develop they subsume the previous ones, creating a more complex organism. This process happens in all the sectors and manifestations of the soul.

Our soul always has the possibility of experiencing the primordial ground and nature, and recognizing the nondual condition of Reality, but she cannot remain with this perception unless she is sufficiently mature and complete to live this realization. This is why enlightenment cannot simply be one definitive experience. Direct recognition of the ultimate truth does not by itself bring about enlightenment and liberation. In fact, the soul cannot actually absorb the significance and implications of such experience all at once.

When we think of our lives, we think in terms of content. Our life is our situation, engagements, relationships, activities, projects, interests and pursuits, social and work structures, and so on. We think of how we spend our time, what things we do, what we value and pursue, our expressions and creativity, and the physical and human spheres within which all these take place. However, all of this content is actually the context, the matrix, where our life takes place. It is not actually our life. These are the external manifestations of our life, just as inner events are the external manifestations of the soul. Our life is what we experience of it. It is the totality of our experience. This means that my interests, for instance, are not my life; rather, my experience of my interests is my life.

Our life is not what we experience, but the experience of what we experience. It is the vision of the ocean, the sensation of coolness and wetness when I am swimming, the taste of bitter saltiness of the water. All of these are what actually constitutes my life. My life is my experiences of both outer and inner events. This is not a move toward solipsism, for it is clear that the ocean exists in its own right, independent of my individual mind, and enters the lives of many other people, as well as the lives of many other types of sentient beings.

Our life is constituted by the various forms that arise in our consciousness, which is our soul. Our life is actually the transformations and unfoldment of the soul. This is the essence of our life, the felt core of our experiences. To put it differently, our life is the life of the soul, where the life of the soul is her flow and unfoldment. This understanding brings our life closer to home. To recognize this truth helps us to feel our life directly, rather than knowing it as dispersed into various pieces of content. With this understanding and recognition, life becomes more direct, more experiential, more intimate. It is no longer the rarified life of the discursive mind that takes its life to be the external content it reifies and conceptualizes. The perspective of the life of the soul that we present here can allow us to know our lives as integrated into a unified current, an unfolding stream of continual actualization. Our life becomes full of meaning, for it embodies then the fullness of our soul.

Our life is actually the transformations and unfoldment of the soul. This is the essence of our life, the felt core of our experiences. To put it differently, our life is the life of the soul, where the life of the soul is her flow and unfoldment. This understanding brings our life closer to home. To recognize this truth helps us to feel our life directly, rather than knowing it as dispersed into various pieces of content. With this understanding and recognition, life becomes more direct, more experiential, more intimate. It is no longer the rarified life of the discursive mind that takes its life to be the external content it reifies and conceptualizes.

In other words, life is an epiphenomenon of matter; as matter reaches a certain complexity and interacts with itself under certain physical conditions, it begins to have a new property, life. It achieves a level of organization that gives it a self-organizing capacity, which then manifests as a particular unified functioning. When it malfunctions and loses integrity it dies, losing this capacity and beginning to disorganize and dissolve.

In our view, life is inherent to the universe, rather than merely being a potential that arises when self-organization reaches a high level of complexity. In our view the universe is alive, and has always been alive. More precisely, when we investigate the universe from the perspective of its wave side, from its ground of consciousness, we find that life is a property inherent to the universe, characterizing some of its dimensions and forms. When we see the cosmos evolving through the development of self-organizing open physical systems, we are actually witnessing the life inherent to the universe, but from the particle side.

The fact that some individuals have more aliveness than others, even when they are older and their bodies more deteriorated, cannot be accounted for by the theory that life is a property of the physical

We have described the medium or field of the soul as the presence of pure consciousness. In labeling the field “presence” we point to the significant fact that this field constitutes the ontological dimension of the soul. In other words, the existence of the soul turns out not to be only an abstract

This process is similar to the physicists’ preoccupation with the most elementary particles of matter; they are trying to find the ultimate building blocks of our physical universe. The presence of pure consciousness turns out to be the ultimate building block of our psychic life, the ultimate ground of our soul.

In other words, if we investigate what the final essence of the soul is, the essence beyond particular manifestations, we find it to be this presence of pure consciousness. Therefore, we refer to this presence of pure consciousness as essence, meaning the essence of the soul. So essence is the ultimate ground of the soul, her final nature, her absolute purity. We also refer to it as the true nature of the soul, meaning that if we investigate our soul and are able to penetrate all of our beliefs and prejudices about her, and are able to behold her with total objectivity, without the slightest subjective posture or position, without any obscurations or veils, we find her as this essence, which is presence. Essence and true nature are the same thing, but viewed from different perspectives: when we view the ultimate and simplest ground of the soul from the perspective of its most basic constituency we refer to it as essence, just as the essence of water is H2O molecules; and when we view it from the perspective of its final and most naked truth we refer to it as true nature. There exist some minor disagreements among the various wisdom traditions about this essence or true nature. Some think of it as presence, some as awareness, some as light, some as love, and some as emptiness. But these views actually reflect fine distinctions and subtle discriminations in the experience and understanding of ultimate truth.

Essence as fundamental ground of the soul is basically pure nondifferentiated presence, colorless and without qualities. Thus it is the manifestation of the true nature of everything in the soul. But essence rarely manifests in our individual experience in its pure and nondifferentiated mode; or more precisely, it is difficult for most individuals to recognize essence in its nondifferentiated state. However, essence manifests in other ways, by differentiating into presence with recognizable qualities.

We have discussed how essence is a presence of pure consciousness that also possesses the capacity to recognize itself as presence. This is the inherent coemergence and coextensiveness of the dimension of nonconceptual mirror-like awareness responsible for bare perception, and the dimension of basic knowledge responsible for cognition and recognition. So essence is presence that is inseparable from awareness of this presence, and is also inseparable from the knowingness of this presence. The presence, the awareness, and the knowingness are the same thing in the experience of pure nondifferentiated essence. We have seen that this fundamental ground of the soul is aware of differentiation in a mirror-like fashion, but also that this differentiation appears within it as formations within a field.

Alternately stated, essence can manifest itself within as these perfect spiritual qualities, when the fundamental ground and nondifferentiated presence of the soul transforms a region of its field into this particular quality. The form that appears may have a shape but it might not; it may be bounded and limited or boundless and infinite. But it will have recognizable characteristics in all the dimensions of the Riemannian manifold of the soul. In other words, these noetic forms will be presence characterized not only by the three spatial dimensions, but also by color, texture, taste, smell, sound, viscosity, luminosity, density, and affect. They are noetic forms because each possesses a distinguishing cognitive component, which we call a universal concept. These forms are universal concepts, in that they are not personal or cultural ones constructed by individual minds. They are the spontaneous manifestations of true nature itself, and they can be recognized because true nature possesses inherent basic knowingness that it gives to the soul. (See Diamond Heart, Book 4, chapter 16.)

The noetic quality is not separate from the presence; it is completely indistinguishable from it. The knowingness of presence is now simply inseparable from the recognition of the quality. The knowing here is that of basic knowledge, so it is pervasive throughout the presence, not a recognition apart from it.

Each aspect is aware of itself, and only of itself. It is the presence of a particular quality, and only this quality. It is a pure consciousness, a consciousness aware of its presence, but its knowledge is different from that of the soul. The soul can be aware of herself as pure consciousness, and then she is like essence, for she is then essence. The soul, however, can know herself as any of the aspects of essence, for all of these aspects are elements of her potential. On the other hand, an essential aspect is only itself, without the potential to be anything else.

All these phenomena might only be forms discerned by our nonconceptual awareness, in which case it is not knowing yet. Knowing involves the presence of the dimension of basic knowledge, coemergent with pure awareness of the form, which intersects all of the above subtle sensory dimensions, and synthesizes them as a unified gestalt with a particular affect. With the quality of personal love, this affect is that of liking, appreciation, and a happy enjoyment of whatever we perceive. This affect implies a recognition, a direct apprehension of a particular meaning. The multidimensional expanse of presence recognizes itself not only as presence but also as love. A kind of concept is present now, not mental, not discursive, and not a result of remembering stored information. We know love by being love. Our soul knows it directly because it is a quality of her basic consciousness, not a thought in the mind. There is no dichotomy of subject and object here. I am not a self who is experiencing love. In the full experience of love I am love. The knower is the known, the presence of love. This presence is pure consciousness that is directly cognizant of the quality that pervasively characterizes it. I am love, and my knowledge of love is the presence of love.

In other words, essence, with all its aspects, provides the soul with the prototypes of her capacities and functions, as well as the qualities needed for her life with others. These qualities and faculties are needed for everyday life, but are also necessary for the inner journey home. In other words, our true nature provides us with all that we need in our inner and direct experience, both to live a functional and effective life, and to help ourselves and others reach spiritual maturation and completion.

This situation reflects the total potential of the soul. The soul’s potential includes far more than the essential dimension. In addition to the capacities and faculties of action, imagination, expression, communication, conceptualizing, thinking, remembering, integrating, synthesizing, creativity, and so on, the soul possesses a whole other range of potential for experience. Qualitatively, her potential can be divided into two kinds: the essential-spiritual and the animal-primitive. We have been discussing the essential side of her potential, but the wretched qualities so well known to us are mostly due to the animal side, and the interaction between it and the essential. What do we mean by the animal side of the soul’s potential? It is inherent to the human soul that she can be like an angel, with all the purity of essence and its beautiful aspects, but she can also be like an animal, with all the primitiveness and irrational instinctuality characterizing the animal kingdom. We humans can be loving and selfless because this is part of our inherent potential, but we can also be driven by instinctual needs and drives to extremes of destructiveness, possessiveness, and self-centeredness; this is also inherent to our potential.

Qualitatively, her potential can be divided into two kinds: the essential-spiritual and the animal-primitive.

The struggle to balance the angelic side of our souls with the animal side lies at the

This happens to be the station of the vast majority of humanity, but the complete human being, the being who is fully human, is one who has fully realized and integrated the two sides of the soul’s potential. The fully human being retains animal instincts, for instance, but these instincts are integrated into a perspective of selflessness and compassion. Even though the wisdom traditions have understood this and developed ways and methods for accomplishing it, the paths are so steep and difficult that many involved in these traditions settle for an unbalanced development that usually involves suppressing and splitting off the animal side. The rest of humanity continues the struggle, balanced on the side of the animal, which is the path of least resistance.

When we experience our animal potential fully, we do not necessarily experience ourselves as a person who is feeling intense lust and desire. When we experience the sense of the animal soul itself, it appears as a primitive mass. Experiencing the animal soul in itself, one feels oneself to be either a shapeless instinctual organism, with no human form or animal one, or sometimes as a primitive organism with a minimum of structure. The animal soul is a blob of a creature, full of lust and desire, hunger and aggression. The amorphousness of the animal soul has remained so because normal ego development tends not to deal adequately with this dimension of our soul. This is a reflection of the inability of our civilization to harmoniously integrate the animal soul. It is usually repressed or split off from our conscious experience of ourselves, except for minor surges that we have learned to manage. Therefore, when we finally confront this powerful aspect of the soul we find a dimension of our self that is very energetic but has a minimum of structure.

We can experience the animal soul in this most basic structureless form or with impressions of the forms of some primitive organisms and animals. For instance, when the animal soul is full of irrationally directed aggression, it is typical to experience it in the form of spiders, typically tarantulas, or snakes.

By seeing through the distortions that have twisted our soul, the dissociation and splitting of our aggression, power, and strength, and coming to a place of acceptance, resolution, and understanding of these elements of our potential, the forms we experience may move from that of a heartless and primitive animal form that embodies hatred and vengeance, like a hissing black snake, into the more evolved, graceful, and beautiful form of a black panther, at peace with its vitality and power. We experience then our essential power and vitality, but in the animal form of a panther that is in harmony with its nature but also in a contented and peaceful state.

move from that of a heartless and primitive animal form that embodies hatred and vengeance, like a hissing black snake, into the more evolved, graceful, and beautiful form of a black panther, at peace with its vitality and power.

Sometimes, however, the soul can lose all structure, and appear as an undifferentiated blob of protoplasm. It is as if the amoeba sheds its nucleus and membrane and becomes just a puddle of protoplasm. At such times, the

individual feels no sense of psychological structure, no definition, no form or shape, no identity, and no firmness.

The protoplasmic soul can be transparent to essence in its various aspects. This brings up another interesting observation, which is that when essence arises within this protoplasmic soul, the soul begins to evolve and develop inner cohesion and structure, and move toward integration and individuation. The presence of essence in the soul, with all of its aspects, seems to function similarly to the nucleus of a cell, with its DNA that patterns the differentiation and structuration of the cell. This observation is partly why we understand the evolution of the soul to include individuation, and why we think individuation is engendered in the soul by the impact of essence on her basic protoplasmic substance.

To end this discussion of the animal soul we need to note the important truth that the animal soul is not another soul, not a separate soul. It is one of the dimensions of the soul. We have, or more accurately are, one unified indivisible soul. We have many dimensions of potentialities. At any time, and at any of stage of development, we can experience any of these potentials, even though different forms of experience dominate at different stages.

When the infant is not deprived, abused, or frustrated, its animality is normally mixed with its essential qualities, where a harmony can be observed, similar to what happens to animals in the wild. So when the infant or baby needs, for instance, the closeness of its mother’s body and warmth, and it is not left unattended long enough to develop frustration, its wanting can manifest so full of love and tenderness that it melts the mother’s heart. The same kind of harmonious mix appears in the state of the infant’s soul when there is satisfaction, pleasure, comfortable rest, or loving holding.

From this place the soul begins her life, and goes through various stages of development toward maturity. The major portion of this development happens in the first

This state, which we refer to as basic trust, is inherent to the soul by the mere

Upon closer scrutiny we recognize that when the soul experiences herself as adequately held, she feels herself embraced, bathed, literally held by a field of love, tenderness, and gentleness. What actually happens is that the soul experiences her environment as pervaded by a loving and gentle presence. For her, the caring holding is inseparable from this loving presence; in fact, she feels this loving presence to be inseparable from the environment itself.

Thus her dynamism manifests exactly what she needs at the moment for her further learning and growth. In other words, the adequacy of the environment supports her to be true to herself, and to grow and develop.

This incompleteness is in itself a recipe for feebleness and vulnerability, for it means that elements of her own potential constitute a threat to the soul’s narcissistic equilibrium, since this equilibrium is developed on the exclusion of these elements. That is why the parent needs not only to mirror but also to call forth the soul’s potential.

The result is that the most fundamental part of the soul, her essential ground and its aspects, will receive at best a minimum of mirroring and support. The soul develops without integrating this fundamental dimension into her identity, leading again to her dissociating her experience of her essential nature. Instead, the soul integrates only the elements of her potential that her human environment could reflect and support.

Since the soul is mostly not self-reflective early in her life, she does not recognize her true nature. She abides in it without recognizing it. Furthermore, even if for some reason she sees it she will not recognize it. She does not discriminate it in her experience as something independent from the various forms and shapes she experiences, because her discriminating capacity is not developed enough to do so. By the time the soul is able to self-reflect in a sufficiently discriminating way, her ego development has already structured her experience to exclude the essential ground.

To understand this we need to remember that for the soul to include something in her identity, she first needs to recognize it. This is the reason for her need for mirroring in childhood. The fact that she does not discern her essential ground of presence, does not recognize it, means she cannot include it in her identity. She cannot include it in her self-representation, nor can she retain it as a memory or an impression of herself. We see here that there are two things involved in this original absence of recognition—the lack or insufficiency of self-reflection and the limitation in the discriminating capacity.

Ego structure depends on two levels of impressions in the soul. We have discussed primarily those semi-permanent impressions that are due to the self-representation and its subunits molding the field of the soul. This self-representation is built up using memory traces of earlier, more momentary impressions. However, some of

these early impressions remain in a semi-permanent way, not through representational memory, but by the impressions being strong enough, or repeated frequently enough, that they directly condition the substance of the soul. These are the kind of impressions we discussed in chapter 7, the direct structuring of the soul field by her own intense or repeated experience.

Because of this understanding we can assume that the forerunners of ego development extend back into prenatal life, to the beginning of life in the womb. We will discuss these prenatal structures in the next chapter; but we want to note here that these earlier structures actually function as the initial ground of the more familiar ego structures. Because of this, the exploration of one’s ego structures will arrive at some point at preverbal and even prenatal structures of one’s soul. This tends to happen in the inner journey because this journey takes us to dimensions of Being that are beyond conceptualization and memory.

We discussed the animal potential of the soul in chapter 10. The animal forms that manifest in early childhood are included in the overall ego structuring of the soul because the animal instincts, drives, and impulses are important components of early experiences, as in the object relations that are internalized and integrated into the self-representation. In addition, these experiences tend to be very intense and dominant in early childhood, making them a major component of what is remembered and integrated. The animal component of the soul structures her in even more global ways that tend to dissociate her from her essential presence: the early stages of development of the soul have to do mostly with physical indwelling. The infant soul’s experience is dominated by her physical needs and impulses, because the body is in the time of its greatest vulnerability and need. The dominant need is the survival and growth of the body, and so physical and animal forms of experience dominate the experience of the young soul. Her most intense and regularly repeated experiences are those of hunger, eating, satiation, defecating and urinating, physical discomfort and its relief, physical

addition, these structures are primitive in their content, containing memories and imprints of early childhood experiences before ego structures were established. These structures are primitive partly because they were not integrated into higher level ego structuring; they tend to be split-off structures, separate from and alien to

Because of this these primitive structures may arise in experience independent of work on the structures of the central ego. This happens when a particular situation invokes a primitive structure, where the individual identifies with it at the expense of the central ego. It is as if one becomes another self, through one’s identity shifting to a split off part of the soul. Sometimes a primitive structure is only repressed, rather than split off, forming an unconscious structure of the central ego. This structure will then tend not to arise in experience until a person does work on the central ego, undoing the repression related to the more primitive structures. Because these early primitive structures tend to be more flexible than the more mental ego structures, they will become readily unstructured when investigated. We then may experience them as an amorphous, blobby kind of presence, instead of the clear and crisp presence of essence. We group them into two levels, reflecting two degrees of primitive structuring.

The less primitive group has more ego structure, and hence tends to be formed by the body image. These structures are formed by an image of being a young child, who is still somewhat in touch with its animal, instinctual, primitive impulsive emotionality, and with the remnants of some essential aspects. The primary structure is what we call the “soul child,” which is the state of the soul before she was completely structured and became estranged from her primitive animal forms and her essential ground. This is the structure popularly known as the “inner child”—the child of joy, the emotional child that is still in touch with its original qualities of aliveness, curiosity, mischievousness, openness, and so on. It is what is popularly called the emotional child, but slightly different. The emotional child is only the emotional part of the soul child. In reality, as children we were not only emotional; we were livings souls, full of life and vigor, adventurous and curious, joyous and playful, but also capable of exploding in rage and frustration, or going into fear and terror.

This soul child becomes repressed and/or split off from the central ego early on, because it contains the main elements of the soul that were not adequately held by the environment. These elements include essential qualities, but the repression happens mainly because of the animal and emotional forms that the environment found unacceptable or inappropriate to the structures of civilized social life. The soul child is the site of the classical passions of pride, covetousness, anger, envy, and so on, and hence clarifying these passions from the soul will bring an encounter with this structure. One way of understanding the soul child is to contrast it with the central ego. The latter becomes the adult ego, but the soul child is the part of the soul that is split off and/or repressed, and hence does not have the chance to grow. It remains in its original condition of primitiveness and relative structurelessness. It has the aliveness and joie de vivre that characterizes children, while the central ego is the serious, civilized, and functional adult who mostly means business.

In other words, the animal soul is originally run by drives and instinctual appetites, but it is not particularly destructive or grossly and intentionally selfish, but similar to animals in the wild. However, because it is disowned, it loses contact with the other elements of the soul, and becomes distorted and extreme in the intensity of its aggression, worse than actual animals.

Our animal qualities are seen as bad, and the superego functions to control the impulses of the libidinal soul, so that they do not penetrate to consciousness or get acted out. This separates the animal dimension of the soul from true learning and civilization, and also from being impacted by spiritual aspects of the soul. Thus in the course of inner work, when we first get in touch with the libidinal soul we find it in this split off and hence distorted and exaggerated animalistic form. We feel then justified to continue our rejection and revulsion; but when we observe it with nonjudgmental awareness, it may transform to its original animal form, with its grace and power.

The animal or libidinal soul is driven by two primary instincts or drives: the aggressive and the libidinal. The aggressive drive includes the soul’s power and energy directed toward survival and all of its correlates: dominance, rivalry, territoriality, etc. The libidinal drive includes sexual and erotic energy and impulses, animalistic wanting and desire, and the desires for togetherness, connection, and so on. These two drives appear in the animal soul within the context of two primitive object relations, again split off from each other. The first contains the aggressive drive and we refer to it as the “rejection object relation,” and the second contains the libidinal drive and we refer to it as the “libidinal and/or frustrating object relation.” These two object relations make up a triad with a third, which we call “the central object relation.” They are structured according to the earliest relation the soul had with her mother, or mothering person. The central object relation contains the mostly positive and good part of the relationship, while the other two contain the difficult or bad part. More specifically, the infant’s soul splits her…

of self that engage the three breasts within the three object relations. The primitive object relations tend to remain in their original form, split off from normal consciousness…

The self-image is not only small and helpless, but good and soft, while the rejecting object is big, powerful, and bad. When one experiences this object relation one tends to feel paranoid and frightened in relation to people who seem powerful or in a position to reject one. The splitting characteristic (seeing things as all-bad or all-good) manifests in the fact that the object is not only powerful and big, but bad and hateful, with no heart or compassion. In other words, the object is a purely bad one, indicating the operation of a splitting defense, for this pure badness is quite rare, if not impossible, in actual human beings. The understanding of this object relation begins when…

When we understand this object relation and see its genesis in early experience with parents, especially with what is experienced as the bad mother, we recognize that the self feels weak and the object powerful because the self has projected its own power onto the object. The self takes the position that power is bad, especially when seeing hateful and destructive manifestations of it in its environment. She basically equates power and hatred, and projects both of these onto the object, usually onto a split-off object. In other words, the soul splits off her hatred and power and projects them onto the bad powerful object. She then feels herself to be without hatred, hence good and innocent, but because she equates hatred and badness with power she is also powerless. The object, on the other hand, becomes all-powerful, but hateful and bad. The result is a weak but good self terrified of a powerful and bad object. We refer to this structure as the rejecting object relation…

The direct experience of the hatred can take the soul to a clear experience of itself as the animal soul: ruthless, irrational, heartless, hateful, destructive, and very powerful. The natural human tendency is of course to reject this structure; one wants to feel that it is alien to oneself, thus the impulse toward splitting. But with sufficient openness and objectivity one can experience it fully, as a powerful entity, an alien animal form full of brute instinct and ruthless determination to get what it wants regardless of consequences to others. The qualities of selfishness and destructiveness turn out to be incidental and unintentional; this animal entity is simply not going to tolerate anything that stands in its way. The ruthlessness of the animal soul is not personal and not intentional; it will simply wipe out whatever stands in its way without hesitation or qualms. At the beginning we tend to reject these heartless and guiltless qualities of the animal soul. However, the heart is simply irrelevant for this animal form, which is purely instinct. The animal soul is not a cruel human who has lost her heart. As we come to understand this manifestation, we begin to see that its exaggerated destructiveness and hateful quality are actually reactions to frustration. Because the instinctual self is not allowed to be powerful and effective in getting its way, its power turns into destructive hatred and heartless reactivity. The particulars of this structure connect with one’s early history in relation to power, control, destructiveness, as well as the need to protect the vulnerable and loving heart. When we are finally able to experience this animal form without either rejection or judgment or acting out, it transforms into its original animal form. This turns out to be an animal kind of power and energy, calm and confident, peaceful but ready to act with full power and energy. The opening of this experience removes the negativity associated…

without reaction or attachment, the soul releases the animal form and manifests herself simply as the presence of essence in the quality of power. The soul manifests stillness, immensity, and…

Any object will do, will copulate with whatever creature that comes its way. It will eat whatever seems full and meaty, with no considerations of manner or taste. This is the desire side of the animal soul, fully embodying and expressing her instinctual nature.

The object appears here as beautiful and desirable in an animal instinctual way, full and luscious. Its prototype is the engorged, youthful, and turned-on breast, full of milk, thick juicy nectars, robust energy, and aliveness. It is a full and gleaming breast, desirable and inviting. It promises to give the soul the object she needs, the object that will satisfy her hunger and bring her erotic pleasure. The libidinal soul loves this object passionately and wants to gobble it up with gusto and total satisfaction.

When this object relation finally surfaces in inner work, there is normally a strong superego rejection and disapproval, often accompanied by intense feelings of disgust and revulsion at the extremity of animal instinctuality. The individual is afraid he will turn into an insatiable beast, voraciously eating everything and copulating with everything that moves. With consistent inquiry one may be able to experience the intense frustration and disappointment involved in this object relation, then become aware of the intense desire and wanting. This unveiling of the repressed material frees one’s instinctual desire, and allows it to come into consciousness. When this instinctual energy is opened, there arises the danger of becoming attached to its exhilarating, passionate aliveness, especially if the individual has lived a controlled and puritanical life. The insight that begins the process of working through this issue is the recognition of projection onto the libidinal object. One may recognize that the good mother or wonderful breast was beautiful and desirable, but the object he sees in his mind does not actually exist in the world. One may see at some point that the beautiful, luscious object, which is the true object of the soul’s libidinal desire, contains all the wonderful, sweet, and fulfilling nectars of the essential heart qualities. The libidinal object turns out to be a strong, alive heart, full of a living presence that contains luscious juices that normally manifest in the heart when it is open to its essential qualities.

The infant soul seems to project her heart qualities onto the good breast or the mother because she tends to feel these qualities when she actually gets the object. She believes that this yummy richness actually comes from the breast, like milk. This is partly because the soul is initially not completely differentiated from the libidinal object. There is also no differentiation at the beginning between the physical and the essential, and the animal orientation of the soul toward the external object becomes structured through this experience. But since there is rarely a complete and perfect satisfaction, the dissatisfaction becomes split off into this libidinal and frustrating object relation.

Only by addressing this deeper and more fundamental dimension of these structures can we truly understand them and liberate our souls from their compulsive and limiting patterns.

The structures we have discussed so far are formed by impressing the soul with self-images in the process of ego development. The primitive forms, especially the libidinal soul, are less structured, but they do develop in the stages when memory and cognition are sufficient for the formation of mental representations. They include both direct impressions and mental images. The preconceptual structures we will now discuss develop before there is cognitive development, so they are exclusively direct imprints of experience on the field of the soul. Strong impressions leave deep traces on the soul that structure it in a relatively permanent manner, forming the forerunners of actual ego structures. They develop before the soul has the capacity to identify with mental images and representations. They set the original template, the original general terrain of the soul’s structure. These structures are generally impressions of physical organs and processes that predominate at the beginning of life. Most of these seem to form the preconceptual foundation for the libidinal soul in particular.

One becomes aware of a rigidity structuring experience, which upon investigation reveals an underlying emptiness; the understanding of this emptiness leads to the emergence of essence in one or more of its aspects or dimensions. Working through her early, preverbal, precognitive, or preconceptual structures tends to lead the soul’s experience to very subtle and deep dimensions of true nature. It is these structures that, if not worked through, form a hindrance to the clear experience and integration of the basic, mainly noncognitive dimensions of true nature. However, because these structures tend to block the soul’s openness to such deep levels of presence they also function as barriers to more discriminated aspects of presence, for essence is not organized like a layered cake but more as coextensive interpenetrating dimensions.

Embryonic development is an intense growth process, during which organs form and function, the body systems develop, and the whole organism differentiates into an amazing complexity from very simple building blocks. This rich and eventful process impacts the impressionable soul, and some of these impacts survive as rudimentary structuring, depending on the intensity or duration of a particular process or physical structure. These impressions become the initial “grooves” in the soul, influencing and orienting future development. We recognize three sources of structure in prenatal life. First, since the sensitive field of consciousness is completely inseparable from the physical organism, intense physical processes with their anatomical development will impress the soul with more or less permanent structures. The impact of a new anatomical development, at the beginning as bulges and tubes but later on more complex and complete, leaves long-lasting impressions, impressions that become the initial blueprint for ego structures in general. Second, major prenatal events, especially difficult ones, will also leave long-lasting impressions on the soul. These include difficult initial implantation, the umbilical cord wrapping tightly around the developing embryo, and similar events. Third, the state of the holding environment, in this case the mother and her womb, may imprint the soul with either positive or negative impressions. This can be the general influence of the mother’s health, her emotional state, and whether she takes medications, alcohol, cigarettes, or drugs. These will directly affect the state of the soul because the soul cannot differentiate herself from her environment. She will feel the mother’s inner states, and will be affected by her physical condition, but will experience it happening in her own field; thus these impacts will form impressions that will later be integrated into her sense of identity.

Another structure that arises for students is the placental object relation structure. One experiences oneself as an undefined entity of some sort, literally connected to a bigger something through something that delivers nutrition from the big object. This is not merely a self-structure; it is a whole object relation, but in a very primitive form, which one senses in a way that feels neither clearly physical or psychological. The affective mood of this placental object relation seems to be determined largely by the emotional and physical condition of the mother

during pregnancy.

We have also observed a whole family of prenatal structures that are imprints from early embryonic development. These generally take the form of tubes and bulges of various kinds and combinations, reflecting the morphology of these early stages. At the beginning the zygote differentiates and develops into three tubes, out of the three layers of the original disc. These tubes are dominant physical structures at a time when the soul is quite impressionable. The imprint of these prenatal tubes functions as a forerunner of ego separating boundaries. More accurately, the early tubular structure of the embryo imprints the soul with a form that becomes an initial body image according to which the sense of separating boundaries develops. This is, we believe, the reason that when we inquire into the ego separating boundaries we frequently find a structure in the shape of a tube along the body. The soul contracts and forms a tube, which sometimes feels like plastic, that gives her the sense of being an autonomous entity.

Though these primitive structures underlie our everyday experience, we cannot discern them until we have made transparent the more superficial structures built on top of them.

The first journey is the entry into the path, undergoing initial preparation and setting the ground. This includes the work of developing one’s orientation and inner capacities, and the initial work of learning to be present and to inquire into one’s experience. This journey culminates in the discovery of the presence of Essence, and in learning to recognize it in its various qualities. The transition from the first to the second journey is not marked by a particular experience, but by a process of discovery whose central element is the initial experience and recognition of presence. This has two phases. The first is the recognition of the medium of the soul, which is presence, generally experienced mixed with structures and impressions. This recognition is the discovery of a living presence that feels to us to be the core of the human being, what makes a human being both human and Being. On directly recognizing the medium of the soul, we feel we know what humanity is, for we are aware of its inner truth and potential. We may in fact feel in contact with all of humanity, for we feel the part of us that is the same in all humanity.

The second phase of transition from the first journey to the second journey is the activation of the subtle centers of the lataif, which is a system of centers through which the primary essential aspects operate. We activate the lataif through concentration meditation and color visualization with music, in the context of a guided process of inquiry into the relevant elements of one’s experience. These methods can open the soul to the arising of essence in its various aspects, and to her recognition of essence as immaculate and perfect presence. We have discussed in detail this process of the discovery and experience of essence as presence in our books Essence and Diamond Heart, Book 1.

In the second journey, essence continues to unfold in its various aspects and dimensions. This is where most of the essential development of the soul occurs, as a process of her integrating the arising essence, which is the same as essence impacting her. The process of essential development takes the soul from her initial condition at the completion of ego development, in which she is dissociated from her true nature and living mostly as the animal soul with a civilized veneer of ego structures, to the station of the human soul. In other words, the discovery and integration of essence transforms the soul from its condition of being primarily an animal soul to the state of being primarily a human soul, a soul with heart. What transforms the animal soul to the human soul is her becoming receptive and transparent to essence. When essence manifests through the attitudes and actions of the soul we recognize that she now behaves in a more human way, with heart. This is primarily the task of the second journey of presence, the journey with presence. The soul journeys here in the company of presence, receptive to it and guided by it. As the soul integrates her essence in its various qualities, she matures and develops her virtues, capacities, and faculties. The process of…

the presence of the soul as an essential person. This personal presence is characterized by maturity, individuation, and personal essential development. It functions as the crystallizing point and the integration prototype around which the soul integrates all her personal experiences of her potential arising in interaction with the events of everyday life. The pearl can also be seen as the essential structure that the soul develops as she metabolizes and transcends her ego structure. Ego structure gives the ego-self the sense of being an autonomous and unique individual. But this structure is constructed through fixed mental impressions in the soul; hence it both dissociates her from her essential ground and limits her development because of its rigidity and fixation. The essential pearl provides the soul with a sense of individuality and personhood that does not depend on fixed impressions, but on spontaneously arising forms of essential presence that structure her experience of herself and give her the capacity to function as a person. The soul matures and transforms into a person of essence. However, the qualities and actions of this person are quite fluid and flexible and are objective responses resonant to the needs and inputs of the environment. We have discussed this aspect and its integration in great detail in The Pearl Beyond Price, and in Diamond Heart, Book 2. The other side of the process of maturation of the soul under the impact of essence is that of the self-realization of true nature. During the second journey, the soul experiences essence mainly as an interior essence, as the preciousness that the soul inherently possesses, that inspires and guides the soul, and provides her with inner sustenance and support. At this point the soul still experiences essence dualistically. She recognizes essence as her nature, but does not feel herself identical to it. She is a soul who experiences her essence. A process then ensues, activated by the aspect of essential identity, the point of existence, that illuminates the barriers limiting the soul in her identification with her essence. This exposes the identity of ego as the primary barrier,…

The pearl can also be seen as the essential structure that the soul develops as she metabolizes and transcends her ego structure. Ego structure gives the ego-self the sense of being an autonomous and unique individual. But this structure is constructed through fixed mental impressions in the soul; hence it both dissociates her from her essential ground and limits her development because of its rigidity and fixation. The essential pearl provides the soul with a sense of individuality and personhood that does not depend on fixed impressions, but on spontaneously arising forms of essential presence that structure her experience of herself and give her the capacity to function as a person.

The realization of the Pearl Beyond Price requires the soul to mature and individuate in her personal life, while the realization of essential identity is a matter of penetrating the false self and the discovery of the real self, essence as one’s identity. Both the maturation of the soul into a pearl and the experience of self-realization of essence usher the soul into the third journey, the journey in presence. The soul is abiding in presence as presence. At this stage the journey is the development of nonduality. The soul’s journey is inseparable from essential presence; this journey is the process of integrating everything into this nondual presence. This process again has two phases or two complementary sides. The first is the essential development of the soul, what we call the essentialization of the soul. It is the complete mixing with essence, where she is not only transparent to it, but this…

In the realization of the boundless dimensions of Being we learn about true nature in and of itself, free from the limitations of separateness, and beyond all forms and manifestations. Nonduality is now complete, for it has integrated the whole of existence, not merely soul with her essence. We will discuss this in more detail in later chapters. We discussed the boundless dimensions briefly in the last part of The Point of Existence, where the focus is on the self-realization of each of these dimensions, and the last part of The Pearl Beyond Price, where the focus is on the personalization or individuation of them. Diamond Heart, Book 3, deals with one of these dimensions in its second half, while the later books in this series all deal with this boundlessness and formlessness of true nature.

Exploring psychodynamic issues reveals to the soul how many of its experiences, attitudes, and actions are influenced by unconscious conflicts, beliefs, and feelings. When one inquires into them, they reveal the related unconscious material. The soul then might recall various events in her early experience, including traumas and abuses, wounds and rejections, intolerable conflicts and deprivations.

To explore an example of working on psychodynamic issues, we can look at one of the presenting issues of the strength aspect. The issue might present itself as a difficulty with anger and aggression, as a stance of passivity and weakness. Exploring this issue may reveal a fear of aggression, which then may remind the soul of the anger she encountered in her early environment, in the person of her father or mother. Making the fear conscious and remembering its source will help the soul to access her own anger, since she is in reality no longer a child who must be passive in the face of the anger of the more powerful adult. Exploring the energy of this emotion can reveal its connection to strength. Anger turns out to be a distortion of essential strength; that is, the quality of strength becomes caught up in the emotion of anger, which is itself caught up in the self-image of being a child in relation to the parents. In this example, the soul was afraid to own up to her strength because of fear of her parents’ anger. So she abandoned and repressed her strength, and its resultant distortion, anger. Working through this issue opens the quality of strength in the soul.

As the soul begins to be open to her aggression and anger, and allows herself to feel strong, she may encounter new difficulties. Now she finds new and deeper barriers to experiencing the essential quality of strength, even though she can be somewhat open to anger and aggression. Continuing her exploration, the soul becomes aware of a sense of weakness, which actually feels like an identification with weakness that the soul is not able to transcend. Further inquiry reveals an image of being a weak person that has become part of the soul’s identity. This identification is not a matter of repression; rather, it is character and structure. Inquiring into this image, the soul may find that as a child she disowned her strength not only because of fear of others’ anger, but because if she had felt strong she would have felt able to stand up to her mother, and even to be separate from her. This insight might reveal conflicts around separation from her mother, a separation that is appropriate at a certain stage of ego development. She may, for instance, discover that her mother could not tolerate the child separating from her, and wanted her to continue to be the mother’s dependent little girl. Because of guilt and compassion for her mother, plus the fear of her wrath, the child resisted acting or

even feeling separate. Therefore, in order to stay close to her mother the child abandoned and continues to ward off her separation drive, which necessitates disowning and repressing her strength. Thus not only is the essential strength repressed, but as the child’s self structures are being built, a part of this structure will include an identification of being without strength, of being a weak child. This first kind of structural issue relates to difficulties in the soul’s process of structure building, part of which is the gradual separation necessary for establishing independent images of herself. However, in the inner journey, we do not stop here. As the soul begins to understand this issue and resolve it, her identification with weakness will become conscious and thus can be dissolved, especially as the strength essence arises, giving her the capacity to be separate and autonomous. Learning that real strength is presence the soul begins to recognize her essence and experience herself as its presence. However, this is a profound shift in her experience of herself, where now she knows herself as an ontological presence rather than as a mental structure built from historical impressions. Recognizing herself as this presence is a much more profound separation from her mother and other objects than her normal ego structure can handle, for this structure is always related to internalized images of others, primarily the mother. To recognize oneself as presence involves a fundamental separation, a separation she has never consciously experienced before, in which she is separating from the whole dimension of images and ego structures. This is too radical a separation for any psychic structure, and she begins to feel she will fall apart and lose the integrity of her self and identity. In other words, presence exposes the mental and constructed nature of her usual sense of self, and reveals how it limits her capacity to be this presence. She needs to go beyond ego structure in order to be presence, but this movement discloses any weaknesses she has in this structure, and raises the possibility of its destructuring. This is the second category of structural issues that arise in the inner journey; these issues have been addressed in different ways by all the wisdom traditions. These issues reflect the soul’s limitation of being structured through the mind, of having ego separateness and an independent self. They are connected to the basic delusion of ego, that it has a separate and autonomous self, existence, will, and so on.

To recognize oneself as presence involves a fundamental separation, a separation she has never consciously experienced before, in which she is separating from the whole dimension of images and ego structures. This is too radical a separation for any psychic structure, and she begins to feel she will fall apart and lose the integrity of her self and identity. In other words, presence exposes the mental and constructed nature of her usual sense of self, and reveals how it limits her capacity to be this presence. She needs to go beyond ego structure in order to be presence, but this movement discloses any weaknesses she has in this structure, and raises the possibility of its destructuring. This is the second category of structural issues that arise in the inner journey; these issues have been addressed in different ways by all the wisdom traditions. These issues reflect the soul’s limitation of being structured through the mind, of having ego separateness and an independent self. They are connected to the basic delusion of ego, that it has a separate and autonomous self, existence, will, and so on.

Existential issues are related to the normal limitations of being a human being living in a world with others. These issues include questions, conflicts, and suffering in relation to desire and desirelessness, gratification and frustration, intimacy and isolation, relatedness and aloneness, love and aggression, instinct and morality, limitation and finitude, transitoriness and mortality, choice and accident, meaning and emptiness, being and nothingness, fear and dread, and so on. These issues reflect the fact that the soul has both animal and essential potential, that she is unrealized without knowing it or knowing that there is any alternative. The soul lives an embodied life with its normal limitations and frustrations, which are compounded by her ignorance of her true nature. These issues tend to arise naturally in life, especially during transitions and intense events, but they also are brought forth intensely due to the inner work. They arise especially as the soul learns to penetrate and transcend her ego structure. To follow our example, when the soul begins to see the limitation of structure and experiences herself as presence, the structure begins to reveal its nature as a mental construct characterized by past conditioning, ideas, memories, etc. The soul begins to experience an inner emptiness, a meaninglessness, a dread of falling apart, and terror of death and annihilation. These experiences of falling apart or being annihilated actually come to pass as the structures dissolve. The soul experiences disintegration and dissolution, disorientation, and a loss of identity; she feels lost and despondent. These existential crises are actually elements of some stages of working through ego structures that then lead to deeper realizations of true nature, moving to timelessness and formlessness.

These developments in turn bring about a profound sense of aloneness, for the presence of Being is not connected psychically to any internalized object relation; it is autonomous from the structured sense of self that consists of representations of the self in relation to others. At the beginning the soul inevitably experiences this transcendence as aloneness, which tends to bring a fear of loss of contact, relatedness, connection, and communication. However, deep and persistent inquiry reveals the intrinsic intimacy of essential presence, whose boundlessness and formlessness constitute a much more fundamental connectedness than that known by the ego-self. The soul contends with the notion of death and the fear of death, and learns, with persistent inquiry, that her true nature transcends both life and death, for it is the pure consciousness that forms the eternal ground of all phenomena. We see, then, that even though the inner journey confronts us, often painfully, with existential issues, the experience and understanding of essence provides resolution and a depth of wisdom not envisaged by existential philosophy or any form of psychotherapy.

In other words, her epistemological stance needs to shift in order for her to experience her true nature, and especially in order to abide in it. She also needs to learn about experience without labeling, discrimination without abstraction, perception without conceptualization, even consciousness without content. Ultimately the soul must radically change her view of reality, which at times may entail abandoning the thinking process, letting go of her perspectives and her knowledge, and occasionally dropping the discriminating mind altogether. These developments bring up both existential fears and structural issues; they also involve dealing with intellectual attachment and pride, vanity and ignorance, confusion and dullness, and vulnerability and defenselessness. As well, the soul faces the inherent epistemological difficulty of making this kind of jump. This requires not only deep and subtle knowledge, discipline, devoted application, and concentration, but also a great deal of precision in perception and experience, courage in beholding the unknown, and an adventurous spirit.

We find that the difficulty with these issues stems partly from their intertwining with structural and psychodynamic ones. As the soul continues to experience her essential presence and begins to recognize how profoundly this reality is beyond mind, she can again become terrified. To go beyond the mind is to go beyond the realm of ego structure, memory, and history: that is, beyond where her accustomed identity grew. The possible loss of identity and structure is greater than ever before, for now deep and primitive structures are exposed, substrata that she has taken all this time to be bedrock reality. The structural fears that arise can also be associated to earlier times of not knowing, vulnerability, and loss of control that accompanied trauma, sickness, loss, or abuse. The epistemological shift brings up psychodynamic material—emotions and conflicts—that make it difficult to stay focused on the purely epistemological task, or attend to the purely phenomenological characteristics of being, which are quite subtle. To return to our example of the soul’s process in the inner journey, we see that as the soul learns about the intrinsic aloneness of essential presence she begins to recognize that she leaves not only the world of object relations when she is presence; by realizing presence and understanding the separation of the red essence, she leaves the totality of her discriminating mind in this radical separation. This can bring up fear of losing her mind, of going crazy, of the unknown, and so on. She also begins to realize how her normal epistemological stance is a great barrier to the continuity and development of her essential realization. She feels the need to go not only beyond her memory but beyond all concepts, for she understands that such concepts are the elementary building blocks of the memories and images that compose her ego structures, structures that limit her realization. Of course, at this juncture true nature can provide the guidance and support to go beyond the conceptual mind; for it is the authentic reality that is transcendent to the mind and that functions as its eternal ground and source. As the soul begins to realize her identity beyond mind, she may return to existential issues. Going beyond mind will initially appear to the soul as going beyond the world, which again raises fears and concerns regarding isolation, aloneness, possibility of loss of love and relationship, and so on.

The wisdom and guidance of true nature can reveal the projections on and ignorance of the phenomenology of Being, an ignorance that the soul fills with her physical and atomistic view. True nature reveals that its Riemannian manifold embraces all of Reality, transforming the…

The process of the soul’s journey is assisted by the arising of certain structures of essential wisdom, which we call the “diamond vehicles.” These vehicles show us that real wisdom can only come from true nature. They are often experienced as messengers from the source of the soul, teaching her about this source and guiding her return to it. These messengers do not function like human messengers, but more like encrypted computer programs that, when their encryption is penetrated, unfold according to a specific content and logic, like a dynamic holographic multidimensional virtual reality. They arise within our field of experience to unveil in this field the deepest and most fundamental truths of its nature and ground. The diamond vehicles function like spaceships, carrying our consciousness to exotic worlds. Each one takes us to a different universe, with different qualities constituting the building blocks of reality. They resemble spaceships in that they are vehicles that travel in inner space, taking our attention to the furthest reaches of Reality. They also resemble spaceships in how they are perceived: they appear as gem-like structures of various shapes and forms, with scintillating colored lights. Their impact on the…

Each faceted gem of the diamond vehicles is an essential aspect with the objective and precise knowledge of what it is from the perspective of essence itself. Each presents the precise knowledge and understanding of one of the perfections of true nature. Each is the universal knowledge of a ray of colored light differentiated out of the colorless clear light of true nature. Each vehicle is a whole body of knowledge, a complete dimension of wisdom that relates to an important segment of the soul’s experience and functionality, and particularly to what is needed for her inner journey home. Each vehicle appears at some juncture of the inner journey, responding to the needs of the soul at this particular phase, and presents its overall view and knowledge, which is a new synthesis of the knowledge of the soul, essence, and their relationship. Then the specific and precise details of this objective knowledge are provided by each diamond of the vehicle. Thus this dimension of essential wisdom appears as the vehicle itself, a structure that combines all the essential diamonds of this dimension, and/or as the diamonds that appear singly, or as a few of them together, not in the vehicular structure. Each diamond presents an essential aspect on the level of its objective wisdom. This refines and completes the understanding of the particular aspect, which in turn deepens and completes the understanding of its relation to the soul, including further understanding and resolution of the soul’s barriers against it.

only wedded to the orientation of seeking pleasure externally, but this orientation is part of a larger one, which is her allegiance to the world and loyalty to its view. This orientation has its roots in the soul’s very early experience of receiving pleasurable gratification from her mother. This early gratification creates an amazingly deep bond, such that the soul grows up deeply loyal to the mother who satisfied her needs and desires. Every soul with normal ego development grows up deeply, though often unconsciously, loyal to her mothering person, the first love object and object of gratification.

The soul’s loyalty to the historical object of gratification and to the orientation associated with it is libidinal, emotional, and philosophical. The mother, or breast, was the first external object and hence the prototype of such objects. Each time the soul relates to an object of gratification, or a love object, the soul cannot help but relate to it in a way that is similar to how she related to her mother. She values it as a source of pleasurable satisfaction and fulfillment; at the same time, she has a deep and committed allegiance to it. But the fact that the first object of gratification is an object that the soul comes to recognize as separate from her and outside her, deeply conditions her to expect pleasure, satisfaction, and fulfillment only from external objects. This expectation becomes the libidinal foundation of the materialistic and worldly view of reality, the view that the animal soul adheres to totally. The first instinctual object and love object, the mother, becomes projected onto later objects, and onto the world, for mother was not only the first object but, at the beginning, the whole world for the infant. The externality of the first object makes the soul, at some point, project this onto all objects that she considers outside herself, onto the totality of manifestation. The soul comes up against this deeply entrenched view of reality when she begins to learn to love truth for its own sake, especially when this truth turns out to be inside her, for it is the truth of her nature.

When the soul learns at some point to make this significant shift, and turns toward the truth, this turn becomes the state or station that invites the descent of the Markabah. This is the diamond body of pleasure, bliss, delight, and celebration, which arises as the soul’s love of truth deepens and becomes a true turning away from the habitual…

soul’s heart is not a turn away from pleasure; it is simply the shift of allegiance from the pleasure of gratification and its sources, to the inner truth of the soul and Reality. The soul moves her allegiance toward truth, understanding its centrality and value irrespective of whether the truth is pleasurable or painful. This turn is the necessary condition for the descent of this diamond vehicle, which…

This becomes easier to understand if we remember the nondual unity of soul and essence; when the soul is turning toward truth and developing allegiance to it, she is already being impacted by the approach of this essential form, causing this particular issue to arise. As the soul works with this issue, which is being pushed to the surface in clear relief by the grace of Being in the form of the Markabah, and as she manages to make the turn because of her commitment to the truth which she…

The soul’s turn toward truth must be heartfelt, genuine, and deep. When she finally reaches this station, she begins to hear the sweet and merry music of the chariot. By turning toward truth, even at the cost of pleasure, she discovers the true and timeless source of all pleasure and bliss. This vehicle manifests first as a merriment, a festive music, a colorful carousel of brilliant lights, as if the inner space of the soul has become a place where a carnival is taking place. There is an inner hearing of light and festive music, a sense of happy and lighthearted singing and dancing. First, as the vehicle is descending, it seems the carnival is at a distance; but it keeps getting closer until it is inside us, and we are participating in the festivities. Then we see colored lights, twirling and dancing like a carousel, with an inner state of happiness, merriment, and joy. As the Markabah descends, we feel a sense of celebration for our attainment, a celebration for having made the difficult turn. The presence of the Markabah appears first as a state of true and joyful celebration: celebration of our victory, celebration of the truth, and celebration of our true nature. It is as if the Markabah itself celebrates its own arrival. For this arrival is the victory…

fills her field with a merriment that far surpasses even the liveliest festivals of the external world. Bringing undiluted and authentic joy, this vehicle is exquisite, beautiful, and delightful while at the same time being totally holy and sacred. This is the first stage of the integration of the Markabah; the second stage occurs when it sinks deep into the manifold of the soul and becomes deeply embodied such that its truth and depth of presence are revealed. We then begin to experience it with more density, substantiality, and fullness. We feel full and fulfilled, impregnated with a…

The soul begins to feel satiated with a deep and full ecstatic pleasure that transcends and surpasses any sexual or sensual ecstasy she has ever experienced before. And it is completely from the inside out. Furthermore, we begin to recognize that the pleasure of gratification is mostly a release of energetic tension, while that of essence is the direct substantial presence of unadulterated pleasure, which can be very intense and amazingly deep. The Markabah is a structure of essence composed of all aspects in the diamond form except that in this dimension each aspect appears not only clear, faceted, and precise but also as the very presence of pure pleasure. Each diamond feels and tastes like a wonderful piece of candy, with an affect deeply and pleasurably satisfying, a state of consciousness that fills the soul with a pleasurable bliss that penetrates and suffuses all of her field, filling all the cells of the body with a glowing and fulfilling sensation. Each diamond feels like a heavenly and full-bodied presence that combines the pleasure of the best food, the greatest sensual and sexual contact, and the utmost of a loving fulfillment. Each diamond is a different kind or flavor of pleasure, so we feel compassion as pleasure, as well as love, strength, truth, clarity, will, and so on. The Markabah is revealed as the body of pleasure, a body composed of the purest and most authentic pleasure, in various qualities and flavors. The Markabah thus discloses to the soul the truth about pleasure, happiness, and enjoyment. It is not…

Learning to be loyal to the truth, the soul is developing allegiance to her true nature, and thus the soul becomes spontaneously wedded to bliss and fulfillment.

The Citadel The diamond vehicle we call the citadel functions as the true protector of the path, the truth, and its realization. The perspective of the citadel discloses that the true and lasting protection and defense for our essential realization is right living; living our lives and conducting ourselves according to the truth of our realization. As we increasingly see through our habitual identifications and recognize who and what we are essentially, we need to live according to such understanding if we want to support our realization and its development. Practice apart from everyday living is not sufficient.

The soul discovers that to truly move toward the inner essential truth and to live the life of essence means abandoning her normal identity and its various external and internal supports. The soul’s experience actually shifts to another experiential universe, where she will need to find different supports for her new identity and its

life. Abandoning her old supports brings up deep fears and terrors, while discovering and implementing the new supports is usually counter to her habitual stances. Allowing the fear that arises from this and other issues connected with the citadel, particularly issues related to ego deficiency and the need to accommodate the desires and needs of other people, the soul can enter into a clear black space devoid of defensive functioning. The soul’s allowing this space brings the possibility of the emergence of the true support for the path, the citadel. As the citadel vehicle begins to manifest within the immediate field of the soul we become aware of its immensity, its forbidding power and deep immovability. Its upper part is diamond solid gold, and its base is diamond platinum. The sense is of solidity and immensity, power and invulnerability. It can fill the whole body, or become as immense as a mountain.

Recognizing the citadel as the defender of essence challenges the defenses of the ego-self, which then brings up her fears and terrors, ultimately the fear of death. Specifically, all these defenses are seen to function as the avoidance of feeling defenseless. Inquiring into the defenses reveals the ego-self’s underlying deficiency and inadequacy, for without the inner essential resources it has no real capacities. This universal ego deficiency turns out to be one of the main issues that the citadel addresses and resolves, with the wisdom that the soul is inherently deficient and truly incapable without her connection to her essential resources.

Right living becomes the invitation for the citadel to take its place in the inner economy of the soul, as the essential defender of the truth

The Diamond Dome

The diamond dome is so called because it has the shape of a dome composed of variously colored diamonds. Its descent in the soul appears first in the form of a delicately faceted and transparently clear dome of clear light, of various beautiful colors, crowning the head. Its manifestation is frequently accompanied by a diamond dorje at the forehead. The state has extreme clarity and lightness, with an amazing sharpness and precision in experience and perception. Its central teaching is objectivity in regard to knowledge of true nature in its various essential aspects.

It provides the soul with the wisdom of essential knowledge, disclosing how true nature is pure being inseparable from knowing.

The diamond dome is basically direct and objective knowledge about true nature; hence it is the wisdom of the path of essence. It demonstrates how each aspect of essence is a particular way of knowing true nature, and shows how the realization of each aspect can be a path on its own. In other words, it shows how the inner journey can be understood, in its totality, in relation to each of the aspects, and how a path can integrate various aspects in its conceptualization, or even the totality of all aspects. The presence of the whole of the diamond dome, as opposed to that of one of its diamonds, provides the complete perspective of not only all the aspects, but the objectively integrated teaching of all the aspects.

This understanding challenges the ego identity, which normally requires rigid and fixed forms to recognize itself. The arising of the diamond dome exposes the ego identity as the primary issue for the state of essential balance, and hence as the central issue for the diamond dome.

Ego death refers here specifically to the soul’s experience of herself free from the identity structure that gives her the normal sense of self-recognition, particularly the egoic sense of having a center, or of the ego identity being the center of experience. Even without this center, she is still partly structured through ego development, but her center is now the peace and stillness of essential emptiness within which true nature presents its various qualities.

This perception is itself revealed through working through each of the essential aspects in such a way that the knowingness of each of the qualities is seen to be intrinsic to the experience of that quality. Working through the issues of the diamond dome reveals that, in contrast, the ego identity subsists through its inner activity, based on rejection, hope, and desire. The soul learns that being her essence is a matter of simply being, and that this essence is recognized by being it. No activity is needed for the soul to be herself. This insight brings about the end of the attitude of seeking that began the inner journey, revealing it as a continuation of the ego activity. The teaching connected with the end of the search, as the soul learns to simply be, and the wisdom regarding being and activity, manifests as the diamond dome descends deeper into the soul. The wisdom of the diamond dome displaces the soul’s ignorance about her instinctual channeling of such searching, and appears now as a turning diamond wheel of teaching. The turning wheel is the manifestation of the diamond dome that ends the inner ego search, and allows unfoldment as a continuity of being.

16    True Nature

AS THE SOUL INTEGRATES the various essential aspects and the diamond vehicles, transforming into an increasingly essential soul, essence begins forcefully to reveal that it is the true nature not only of the soul but of all Reality, of all forms and phenomena, all manifestation. The

Essence expands beyond her individual location and reveals itself as the essence of everything. What does it mean that essence is the essence of everything? To be the essence of something means it is its ultimate substance, its final nature, its most absolute level of existence. To use a physical metaphor, we can see that the essence of the body is protoplasm, but this is not its ultimate substance. To find the most fundamental level of existence of the body we have to go to the most elementary particles composing it, where these building blocks are the final and ultimate ones. Essence also means the simplest level of existence of something.

What does it mean that essence is the essence of everything? To be the essence of something means it is its ultimate substance, its final nature, its most absolute level of existence.

Essence is the essence of the soul in this sense, and it reveals itself at this point to be the essence of everything. But “true nature” has another significant meaning: the true nature of something, as we are using the term, is the most absolute and objective truth about what it is. When we have penetrated all that obscures our direct knowledge of anything, including the essence of the soul, when we have seen through all our inaccurate ideas, beliefs, positions, projections, and distortions, everything that obscures our awareness and knowing of it, we find anything we contemplate to be characterized by this true nature. We have seen that essence is the true nature of the soul in both of these senses: it is her ultimate existential mode and ground, and it is the most objective truth of what she is.

But “true nature” has another significant meaning: the true nature of something, as we are using the term, is the most absolute and objective truth about what it is. When we have penetrated all that obscures our direct knowledge of anything, including the essence of the soul, when we have seen through all our inaccurate ideas, beliefs, positions, projections, and distortions, everything that obscures our awareness and knowing of it, we find anything we contemplate to be characterized by this true nature.

Essential presence is the ontological ground of all phenomena. It is their ultimate substance. It is the true nature of plants, animals, rocks, atoms, elementary particles, energy, light, oceans, planets, galaxies, whatever universes exist, and so on, and the true nature of all thoughts, feelings, sensations, images, and all processes involving any of these objects. Nothing is outside the compass of true nature. We saw in our discussion of the soul that her essence is not composed of distinct isolated parts, not composed of atoms. Essence is a homogeneous and indivisible medium, a true unified field.

Essence is a homogeneous and indivisible medium, a true unified field. Seeing this indivisibility, it is actually a short logical step to recognize that it must be everywhere, as the essence of everything. More fundamentally, however, we increasingly appreciate the characteristics of true nature; it is timeless and infinite, beyond time and space, transcendent to all manifestation, and so on. Here we can explore these characteristics more specifically, to develop our understanding of the transcendence of phenomena, especially of time and space, from the perspective of true nature itself.

Here we can explore these characteristics more specifically, to develop our understanding of the transcendence of phenomena, especially of time and space, from the perspective of true nature itself.

Absolute Transcendence

In the dream are space and time, physical objects and psychological phenomena, even spiritual perceptions, but all these are in and part of Jack’s mind. Jack’s mind, or consciousness, is the ultimate ground of this universe, its most absolute existence, its final constituency, its true nature. The objects of this universe are not exactly Jack’s mind, but they are inseparable from it, are absolutely dependent on it, and are actually manifestations of its possibilities.

Similarly, true nature transcends our actual time and space. Can we say Jack’s mind is composed of parts, of atoms, or is it an indivisible field, a continuous medium? It is an indivisible field that holds all of its dream universe as it transcends this universe along with its time and

This transcendent ground, Jack’s mind, cannot be measured from the point of view of its content.

To say that true nature transcends space means that it cannot be thought of in spatial terms. True nature has no spatial characteristics: extension, distance, shape, or size.

The soul experiences the luminous intensity of true nature, a formless sense of consciousness aware of itself without a self-awareness consisting of shape, size, location, or duration. Since there is no concept of space there is no sense of being small or large, finite or infinite, bounded or boundless; and since there is no concept of time there is no sense of time or timelessness, of being old or young, or of time passing or standing still. There is only an ineffable freedom.

The Unmanifest and Manifestation However, this state is not the normal experience of self-realization; besides there being no ordinary mind, there is no orientation or functioning in this state. The normal experience is that of formlessness inseparable from forms, similar to Jackie’s experience in Jack’s dream. The pure experience of true nature, in its absolute timelessness and spacelessness, is the experience of the unmanifest. In other words, true nature in its true and transcendent truth is unmanifest. The universe, with its space-time, and its underlying spiritual dimensions, is the manifest.

The pure experience of true nature, in its absolute timelessness and spacelessness, is the experience of the unmanifest. In other words, true nature in its true and transcendent truth is unmanifest. The universe, with its space-time, and its underlying spiritual dimensions, is the manifest.

She is timeless and spaceless, but contains all time and space. In fact, she is timeless and spaceless at the same time that she is all time and all space. By being the timeless and spaceless truth, she is, at any instant of time, all time and all space, all of existence. Such is the experience of true nonduality in self-realization. Full nonduality is not a matter of the nonduality of soul and essence, but of the total nonduality of true nature and manifestation. The nonduality of soul and essence is only an instance of the true condition of things, an individual and hence limited nonduality. But as we have seen, the realization of this level of nonduality functions as the entrance to the full nondual condition, reflecting the soul’s function as a bridge between the two worlds, that of duality and of nonduality. We now have two questions to consider. First, what is the nature of true nature? What are its characteristics? Second, how do we experience true nature in self-realization, in the midst of manifestation?

The Timeless Characteristics of True Nature It is questionable to think of true nature as having characteristics, for it is completely indeterminable.

It is questionable to think of true nature as having characteristics, for it is completely indeterminable. It possesses no explicit qualities, no recognizable differentiations. We know that we are experiencing true nature in its full self-realization in that we feel a state and its impact, but we cannot describe it in positive terms. The tendency is to describe it negatively, in terms of what it is not. More precisely, to attribute to it a particular quality gives it a determination from which it is actually free. Any quality or attribute can only be a form it momentarily displays. It cannot be delimited, though people have attempted to describe it throughout the ages.

But such descriptions simply express how we are impacted by the revelation of the infinity of true nature; they do not describe true nature itself.

The form might be empty space, but this is still not true nature. In fact, as we will see shortly, when there is no form manifesting there is no awareness at all, for awareness requires some differentiation, and hence the presence of forms. The situation is even more subtle, leaving ample room for humanity’s mystics, theologians, and philosophers to rack their discriminating brains, split hairs,

and develop many and various systems of metaphysics. The experience of true nature in self-realization has two sides: true nature and manifestation, the ground and the forms that arise out of (or within or as inseparable from) the ground, respectively. Either side can dominate experience. In egoic experience manifestation dominates, completely displacing the awareness of true nature. In self-realization we are aware of true nature as the essence and ground of all the forms. But true nature can dominate the experience in increasing degrees, where the awareness of true nature can outshine the forms of manifestation so completely that it is virtually standing alone.

This experience of no perception, internal or external, is reported by advanced practitioners of most wisdom traditions. This indicates that we cannot know true nature in its absoluteness, because as we move away from manifestation and toward the transcendent truth we lose consciousness of anything. Such a conclusion is supported by the fact that the movement deeper into pure true nature, as awareness relieves itself of the perception of manifestation, is an experience of being increasingly enveloped by darkness, a divine darkness that feels like grace. The sense of the experience is that the light of true nature darkens the consciousness of the soul, liberating her from the perception of phenomena, as it draws her nearer. The soul feels increasingly close to the source as she feels more enveloped by darkness. At the point of complete nearness, that of unity, the darkness is complete, and there is no perception or awareness of anything, including darkness.

Such a conclusion is supported by the fact that the movement deeper into pure true nature, as awareness relieves itself of the perception of manifestation, is an experience of being increasingly enveloped by darkness, a divine darkness that feels like grace. The sense of the experience is that the light of true nature darkens the consciousness of the soul, liberating her from the perception of phenomena, as it draws her nearer. The soul feels increasingly close to the source as she feels more enveloped by darkness. At the point of complete nearness, that of unity, the darkness is complete, and there is no perception or awareness of anything, including darkness.

Knowable/Unknowable Transcendence

The experience of true nature as nonbeing or emptiness does not mean that there is no reality, no soul or manifestation. This is a nihilistic perspective that experience and understanding do not support. The wisdom of emptiness or nonbeing is an attempt to understand the final ontological mode of things. We normally believe that things exist when we perceive them. This belief is accompanied by a subtle underlying feeling or sense of what existence is. Things feel real in a substantial way. We consciously or unconsciously feel that the existence of things is a substantial solid quality. Existence becomes the existence of substance and solidity, which becomes opaqueness if we continue in this direction.

The perception of luminosity in nondual realization may allow us to recognize clear light as a form in itself. It is the everlasting ground of all phenomena, but it can also be experienced as a state in itself, as clear essence in the soul. When we experience it thus we experience it as presence. Clear light, or transparent luminosity, turns out to be the ground presence of essential manifestations. It is pure being, authentic nondifferentiated presence.

Boundless Dimensions of True Nature

The luminosity of the coemergent true nature is not simply the perception of radiance. The luminosity is the factor of awareness in true nature. It is intrinsic to the manifest true nature, for without awareness there is no perception of manifestation. True nature is then awareness, which means that awareness is fundamentally clear transparent presence coemergent with emptiness. Through this luminosity, true nature is inherently capable of being aware of the distinction of forms arising within it as expressions of its own field. Hence, true nature is inseparable from bare awareness. Yet it is not simply awareness, for it is the potentiality for all things.

Recognizing that true nature is always inseparable from the forms it displays points to another perpetual characteristic, that of dynamic creativity. Since there are always forms manifesting, manifestation or display of forms is an ongoing characteristic of Reality, and also since all forms are a display of true nature itself, it is easy to see that in the nondual view true nature is inherently dynamic, endlessly displaying forms. In other words, true nature is not only coemergent awareness but also dynamism itself. True nature is, then, awareness inseparable from dynamism, just as it is inseparable from potential.

The continuous display that true nature enacts always appears in the context of time and space. True nature is timeless and spaceless, but manifests everything in time and space. It forms the ground and essence of all manifestation, but as we saw in our example of Jack’s dream, this ground is one and indivisible. The ground true nature is one unified field that underlies and constitutes all existence. In itself true nature has no dimensions, no spatial or temporal extensions. Yet because all forms manifest within true nature, we will experience it as a boundless, infinite field of coemergent presence. We perceive the presence of true nature as an infinite field of awareness or consciousness, unbounded and unlimited.

True nature in manifestation appears, then, to be omnipresent. It is everywhere, as the indivisible field of presence forming the ground and substance of everything. In self-realization, the soul will experience that she is everywhere, she is everything, she is infinite, she is boundless. In other words, dimensionless true nature will appear in manifestation to possess infinite and endless extension in space. Its original spacelessness appears in manifestation as infinite space. True nature has no distance but it is all the distances in manifestation.

Since true nature is also beyond time, it will appear in manifestation to fill the totality of time. All time appears in true nature, inseparable from it; hence, true nature is all time. However, true nature is timeless, and this timelessness will appear as no time. The experience of true nature as no time, in manifestation, is that of nowness, the present of presence. True nature is always in the present, even when it is in the past or future. In other words, true nature extends through all time, yet it extends as the present of all time. In reality, we can only experience the present of time. Past and future cannot be experienced as such. To go to the past is to go to the present of the past, and going to the future is going to the present of the future.

True nature appears at all times as the now. The now is nothing but true nature experienced in manifestation. This now extends through all time. It is an eternal now. More specifically, we experience true nature in manifestation as the eternal now, the now that extends through all time.

Put differently, we can say that the present moment is the intersection of time with the eternal now. Time touches the now at the present moment, giving us our concept and experience of present time. But this touching expresses the fact that the now touches all time, for it is all time. But it touches all time only at the present of any time. Even though the now holds all time, it has no duration, no time length. Hence, any instant is the present, which is the now, which is all other instants. From this discussion of the reflection of timelessness and spacelessness in the space-time manifest reality, we see that all instants are contained in one instant and all points in one point. This is the most subtle way we can describe the reflection of transcendent true nature in manifestation. If we pursue this line of inquiry, we can only get into deeper paradoxes, but we see at least that true nature is the experience of boundlessness and nowness in the condition of self-realization.

From the above considerations we see that even though true nature is fundamentally free from spatial and temporal extensions, it appears in manifestation as the experience of infinity and eternity, boundlessness and nowness. However, the mystical experience of boundlessness and infinity, and that of eternity and nowness, is not the most direct experience of true nature; rather, it is the experience of true nature from the perspective of the time-space grid of manifestation. This is why true nature is usually described as infinite expanse, omnipresence, omnipotence, omniscience, endlessness, infinity, eternity, and so on.

In other words, rather than viewing reality as true nature appearing in manifestation with such characteristics, we view true nature as manifesting itself with many dimensions. More accurately, we view reality to be a Riemannian manifold with many dimensions of Being: the physical dimension of time and space, the dimension of subtle energy, and the subtle dimensions of presence. The latter are those structuring the presence of true nature.

Even though true nature is composed of five coemergent boundless dimensions, these dimensions generally manifest in the inner journey one by one, in a specific order. The order seems to be of increasing fundamentality and subtlety, moving from the dimension closest to ordinary experience to the one nearest to transcendent truth. These dimensions arise in an order that reveals the characteristics of manifest true nature in increasing depth, subtlety, and precision. The latter levels are simpler than the ones preceding them, possessing less structure and hence less accessibility to our ordinary consciousness. Yet they are all true and authentic dimensions of true nature, spanning the totality of its Riemannian manifold. When a boundless dimension manifests, it relocates the consciousness of the soul to a whole different realm of reality, where she experiences herself and the world in a completely new way. All the elements of her world continue to appear, especially the objective ones not constructed by her mind, but they begin to appear on a different dimension. So the body, physical reality, emotions, thoughts, images, actions, essential aspects, and diamond vehicles all continue to appear, but in a different light. They appear explicitly as manifestations of true nature, with the quality and characteristics of the particular boundless dimension. The elements are all grounded in and inseparable from a boundless and infinite field of presence.

All manifestation is one Reality, unified by the boundless dimension that forms the ground and substance for all forms. Hence, self-realization

on the boundless dimensions is the experience of unity, oneness, and nonduality. It is the knowledge of the indivisibility of true nature, reflecting its nondimensionality, but appearing in the multidimensional manifestation as oneness and unity.

Journeys within the Journey

The journey of descent includes the integration of the five boundless dimensions into a unified whole, recognizing and understanding them as dimensions of the same true nature, coemergent in such a way that they simultaneously structure the full experience of nondual self-realization. In the journey of ascent the soul climbs up the ladder of Reality until she reaches the most subtle dimension of true nature, the absolute. Then she descends by going back and integrating the various dimensions she has passed through in the journey of ascent into this most subtle dimension.

Part Five Dimensions Of True Nature

17    Divine Love and Light

THE PRIMARY OBSTACLE to the arising and integration of the boundlessness of true nature is the ego principle, the idea that the self is a separate and autonomous entity or person. The soul’s development leaves her deeply convinced that she is separate from other souls, and from Reality as a whole. She believes that she is an island that comes into contact with other separate islands. This sense of separateness is due to the ego structure of self-entity that provides the soul with the experience of herself as a bounded entity. (For a precise discussion of this, see The Point of Existence, chapter 9.) One of the primary achievements of ego development is the structuring of the soul according to the surface contours of the body. The soul perceives herself…

The Boundedness of the Ego-Self The soul’s increasing realization of her essential nature spontaneously puts pressure on this structure of separating boundaries, illuminating it and causing the soul to feel an exaggeration of the sense of separateness. One of the ways this inner pressure manifests is that the soul begins to feel constricted, even though she is deeply in touch with her essential nature. She feels limited in a way that causes existential suffering. She longs to be completely essential; she yearns to melt into the sweet juices of essence; but whatever she does, whatever practice she engages in, whatever attitude she takes, nothing works. She feels trapped inside her own skin while she strongly intuits, and frequently knows from direct experience,…

is her potential, and pained with the anguish of separateness from what she deeply loves. At this point the soul may reach depths of despair about ever being released from the trap of isolation; whatever inner efforts she makes only dig her deeper into this dilemma. Eventually she begins to see the futility of doing anything to free herself, even the spiritual practices of meditation, prayer, concentration, contemplation, inquiry, attention, and so on. Whatever she does is her own individual action, exercising her own will and intention, and it is becoming clear that this is an expression of the dilemma itself. It is all based on her own individual desire. To desire is to be the individual she is, to long and yearn for her freedom is to be the same limited person, and it is this individual that does the spiritual practices and works on herself. This separate person…

This is the contribution of the diamond dome; it is part of the wisdom of this vehicle that all such inner activity is the expression of ego activity, as the cycle of rejection-hope-desire, and that such activity is inseparable from the sense of being an individual entity.

The wisdom of the diamond dome brings recognition that the inner hopelessness occurring at this point is objective, that the dilemma is due to this inner activity. The helplessness is due to the fact that such inner activity only entrenches the soul into being the separate individual. More important, the helplessness is objective because no action on the part of the soul can release her from this trap. What is needed is not activity, not a doing of any kind, but a giving up of the struggle. The soul needs to recognize that she actually can do nothing here; she needs to forget about trying to release herself. She needs to forget even about wanting or desiring the release. The resolution does not usually arise through an inner decision based on understanding. It cannot be a surrender based on a strategy. It is more that the understanding truly renders the soul helpless, and by finally accepting her helplessness she simply lets go and forgets her inner struggle. She accepts that she will accept whatever happens, for it is the will of the inner truth, not hers.

soul beings to realize, usually to her surprise, that she is feeling at ease. She may feel a delicate and light presence entering her head from the top, seeping into her body and consciousness. She tastes a delicate sweetness, sees a beautiful golden white light, and feels caressed and bathed by a soft and loving medium. The delicate and sweet light releases her inner tensions, softens her heart, and soothes her anguish. She cannot help but melt into the gentle hands of this loving and caring presence. There…

It is at this point…

The Boundless Ocean of Light and Love The important part of this new experience is that the soul begins to see that the delicate presence of this loving light is not only inside her. It is all around, everywhere, bathing and blessing all manifestation. All forms look as if they are melted and surrendered, softened and released. Everything looks luminous, beautiful, and in complete harmony. She recognizes that essence has now manifested in a boundless form, as the presence of oceanic love that is at the same time light and consciousness. It is conscious love, loving light, the coemergence of presence, light, and love in a soft and delicate ocean that suffuses everything and cleanses it from all her projections. All objects appear immersed in its grace, and all essential aspects manifest as sweet substances condensing from it. She may experience…

There are many variations on this state. One is to experience herself as an infinite and boundless sweet light that forms the ground of all manifestation. All forms arise from it and dissolve back into it. She is not the body and not an individual entity, but the boundless presence of consciousness. Another variation is to experience herself as everything, all manifestation, for this is the state of nonduality of manifestation and true nature. She is true nature, but since true nature is the substance of all phenomena, she is everything…

The common factor in all these forms of realization is that the soul recognizes true nature to be boundless, infinite. She experiences herself in a radically different way; no longer does she know herself as an entity amongst other entities; rather,…

One initial fear, based on lack of true knowledge, may surface even before she experiences the boundlessness of her nature. This issue appears as the fear and concern of losing whatever is associated with being a separate individual entity. She fears losing her separateness, which reveals the deeper fear of losing her individuality, her autonomy, her personal quality. But one of the most alarming expectations here is the fear of losing her individual experience. She believes that if she is not a separate entity, an individual, she won’t be around to experience anything,…

subset of this is the concern about not having her own experience, because she believes experience can only be her own. This fear is not exactly the loss of “I,” but of “my.” This possessive tendency turns out to be a distorted expression of the need to have personal uniqueness and autonomy. This reflects a lack of objective understanding of the personal essence, the true individuation of the soul. This understanding is provided by the stupa diamond vehicle, which challenges the soul’s deep belief that in order for her to feel her personal autonomy and uniqueness she needs the separating boundaries of ego. Furthermore, the stupa unveils the…

The Body of…

As the soul comes to this understanding, her boundaries may begin to merge with the divine effulgence. She becomes part of the ocean, a big drop of the ocean. The drop is a dense liquid honey, or amber nectar, as if the ocean of light liquefies at the location of her body as a big wonderful drop of grace. She sees and feels herself surrounded by…

A great deal of understanding may unveil at this juncture, especially if the diamond guidance has already been integrated and now functions on the dimension of divine love. Its graceful presence attains a soft and divine quality; its faceted diamonds become more fluid and softly glowing. The boundless love is not like someone loving something. It is more of a full and rich presence, softly and delicately textured, with a heavenly affect, sweet but wonderful, uplifting but totally pure and selfless. It bathes all forms, infusing everything with the most sublime love, and blessing appearance with the garb of divinity. Boundless light is not only love, but a dimension of love beyond the human, beyond the individual. It is not for anyone, and not by anyone. It is for everyone; true nature is manifesting everyone, and…

When her rigid structures are made transparent through the unfolding of her process, the soul feels this as an increase in consciousness and presence. At a heightened level of intensity this presence reveals itself as luminous light that now overflows her personal boundaries; the overflow that melts these boundaries is actually the overflow of divine love and grace. Thus it reveals itself as the boundless ocean of Being and love, consciousness and light, the substance and true nature of everything. She experiences herself as a form held by this loving light, inseparable from

She is then the true nature of everything; she is the ground. More exactly, she is everything, as one divine being, where substance and form are wedded into an inseparable Reality. She is ultimately true nature itself, in its divine boundlessness and omnipresent grace. All things are equal, equalized by the unity of appearance.

Boundless Goodness At this juncture, the soul is discovering an important feature of the timeless truth of true nature. She realizes that true nature is goodness itself, and the source of all goodness. It is unblemished goodness, incorruptible goodness, indestructible goodness. Goodness is a fundamental characteristic of true nature, a timeless potential that it might reveal at any time or any place.

Its presence and impact on the soul is fundamentally that of blessing and grace, in all ways and in all dimensions. Such goodness is often not obvious or recognizable, but our lack of perception does not diminish or sully this goodness. The soul often does not perceive this goodness because of her obscurations; but although the goodness can be obscured, it is never destroyed.

not in the discrete and reified forms of the world, which are obscured expressions, but in the depth of the world, in its ultimate nature. The soul can see this only when she is denuded of her obscurations, and surrenders completely to this perception. Denuding herself from the false garments of ignorance and identification, surrendering the illusion of a separate self and her own will, the soul will find this goodness. If she lets herself truly fall, all the way, not into the hands of…

There is goodness in the…

Its outflow is manifestation, an unfolding juicy womb constantly birthing the universe. It is a total generosity, a giving out of substance, existence, life, forms, qualities, capacities, all as manifestations of love. The universe is so rich, so abundant with goodness and wonderful qualities and forms, that when the soul beholds it she cannot help but be completely fulfilled and satisfied, overflowing with deep and sweet gratitude. She now recognizes how impoverished her normal world has been, how empty and barren, and how unreal. She recognizes that this inherent abundance and richness has always been lying in her depths and at the base of all manifestation, but she did not see it because she was looking through filters that specifically filtered out the ground true nature. Belief in her separateness and pride in her independence have functioned as…

Origins of Heart Divine love is the dimension of true nature responsible for the arising of qualities, feelings, and affects in experience. It is not only light, which is consciousness, but also love. Love is the primordial feeling, the source of all affects. Light differentiates into colors; love differentiates into various affects. Divine love is golden white, white for light and golden for love. It is typically experienced as an ocean of golden white, a homogeneous medium, but it can differentiate within this field into the various forms of manifestation, with their myriad shapes and colors. An important and special differentiation is that of the…

reflects the prismatic differentiation of light, but it is also concurrent with and inseparable from the differentiation of the sweet feeling of love into the various affects that characterize the essential aspects. Each of these essential aspects manifesting on the dimension of divine love has the sweetness of love as ground, but with an added subtle differentiation. The emerald green divine love has the warmth and tenderness of compassion; the ruby red love embodies the spirited vitality of strength; the silver white love exudes the confidence and steadfastness of will; the luminous black love is deep with the stillness of peace; the luscious apricot love is redolent with the deep feeling of fulfillment; and so on. These are the original differentiations, which we see here as the differentiations of love. Love is the basic and fundamental feeling of the real world, and it differentiates into the richness of the essential universe. It unfolds into a universe of affects, adding the richness of feeling to experience. We now have…

Love is the ontological ground of the heart and the original source of all feelings. Without divine love there would be no affect, no capacity for feeling, and no such thing as essential heart. On this dimension of Being we experience all manifestation as heart. The whole universe appears as the heart of Being, the love of God. All manifestation is love; its differentiation is the richness of the heart of Being. Hence, it is not only glowing and graceful, but also absolutely harmonious and peaceful. Everything appears to consciousness as plenitude and harmony, the way a full, fulfilled, and peaceful heart will feel. The harmony gives appearance an aura and feeling of beauty. Reality appears magnificent, radiant, and resplendent, full of color, abundant with light, rich with feelings.

This full, rich, melting experience is just what the heart of the soul has always wanted existence to be and life to embody. The soul, particularly the animal aspect of the soul, is generally ignorant of the possibility of this realization. As we have discussed, because the ego-structured soul is dominated by the animal potential, which has an external orientation, it sees abundance and richness only outside itself, and only in certain locations. Divine love reveals that richness and abundance, all that the soul desires, is not only inside, but everywhere. It is a nonlocal phenomenon that reflects the nondimensionality of transcendence in manifestation. All Reality is full and overflowing with richness and wonderful fulfilling qualities. The soul does not need to seek emotional gratification anywhere in particular. Fulfillment is available everywhere, for the very substance of everything is fulfillment.

Ease and Surrender Because this dimension of true nature is of the most pure and gentle love, it impacts the soul in ways she has always longed for but could not fully attain. Its softness is soothing, lulling the mind into rest, the body into natural relaxation, and the heart into serene openness. When touched by this amazingly soft and flowing medium one cannot help but let go and relax. Tensions naturally release, anxieties subside, concerns diminish, and activity becomes easygoing and carefree. One spontaneously feels at ease, as if touched by a heavenly soothing hand, letting go like a baby responding to its loving mother’s intimate holding and comforting. A distinguishing characteristic of this dimension is a sense of being at ease and carefree. The body melts, as if it has been on a prolonged vacation in a tropical paradise, with one’s every need completely taken care of. There is not a worry in the world; instead there is complete security and safety, fullness and abundance. The soul lets go of all of her protective and defensive devices and strategies, for in this realm there is no danger possible, and the heart is so secure and serene that even the concept

of trouble does not exist. It is actually quite similar to how the human infant feels when it is completely taken care of, completely loved and cherished, with abundance of loving care all around, unquestionably available.

The ease characterizing the experience of the soul in this dimension is because it is the kind of love that the soul specifically recognizes as unconditional care and loving holding. It is not a conceptual recognition. It is almost like an instinctual recognition, but it is on the soul level and not just the body. The soul infused by this divine love feels secure, safe and at ease because she feels held and protected in preconceptual ways that her mind can never completely articulate. She cannot help but feel trusting. But this is not a discriminated kind of trust. It is more of preconceptual basic trust, where the soul naturally and spontaneously relaxes, lets go, and surrenders. Surrender is nothing but a melting away of all her rigidities and fixations, concerns and cares. When she feels held by this ocean of love, as one of its inseparable expressions, she knows herself as one of its loved offspring. On the other hand, when she experiences the ground of love as her identity, it is a different kind of experience. She is then the divine presence itself, the infinite and boundless heart of God.

An important example is the implicit position that the ego-self takes of believing the world to be basically unsafe, and at best neutral. This attitude of basic distrust impels the soul to continually resort to strategies and devices to protect and defend herself. We are specifically referring to the defensive attitude of autonomy, where the soul feels that she needs to take things in her own hands, that she will not be automatically taken care of, that if she is not alert, even paranoid, things will not go as they should; her life will fall apart. We have discussed the development of this deep lack of trust in chapter 10. (More extensive discussion can be found in Facets of Unity, chapters 4–6.)

We discussed in chapter 11 how the loss of basic trust leads to the soul’s reactive dissociation from the nondual simplicity of just being. At the present stage of the soul’s journey, at least in the Diamond Approach, the discovery and integration of divine love gives her a great support and momentum for the further stages of this difficult journey.

She learns that her unfoldment is supported by the real universe itself, that it is not in her own hands, and that it is infinitely better that it is in the hands of loving divinity. Such basic trust and confidence on the path spurs the journey forward, accelerating the unfoldment of the soul and the revelation of her true nature and its wisdom.

The presence of divine love, with both its love and light that transcends words and promises, holds the soul and assuages her fear and terror. The most fundamental structures are those of separating boundaries and self-identity, and their underlying ego activity.

The Prince of Darkness The absence of adequate holding in early childhood marks the specific stage at which the soul becomes estranged from divine love. Not only does the soul develop basic distrust, but she begins to lose the precognitive experience of holding and the oceanic sense of presence as her environment. She reacts and takes things psychologically into her own hands. This reaction is generally suffused with bitterness, disappointment, frustration, and hatred. She develops the position that there is no inherent benevolence in the world, within various degrees of distrust.

Its presence at such stage activates the experience of early absence of adequate holding, and the various conflictual feelings about it; the soul remembers and experiences the effects of early deprivations and frustrations, and also intense hatred. It is generally quite a surprise to the soul to discover upon intimate inquiry that this hatred turns out to be directed specifically toward the love and goodness of the new state. The individual feels full of black crystallized hatred, and wants to intensely direct it toward the universal love. He hates the universal love itself, its goodness and benevolence. He wants to destroy it, annihilate it, obliterate it. He cannot stand hearing about it, seeing, or feeling it. Instead of feeling happy and grateful, he feels venomous enmity and opposition toward it. He sees it as the enemy, and is gripped with a hateful desire to take vengeance.

Inquiry into this surprising reaction to the arising of boundless divine love reveals that the soul is identified with a specific demonic form. The soul actually begins to feel as if she has hooves, horns, a tail, and burning red eyes. The soul assumes the form of the devil, just as it is popularly known. One may at this point experience oneself as a huge and powerful presence, in the shape of a black devil intent on opposing and destroying everything good and beautiful in existence.

It is not easy to

acknowledge and experience oneself as an all bad destructive force, which accounts for the issues of splitting that are associated with hatred and how it is the distortion of the power of Being.

This hatred of goodness typically manifests as hatred of God or Being. The vengeful, destructive hatred reveals deep bitterness and intense disappointment in God or Being or whatever the soul believes to be the universal force. The soul felt betrayed and abandoned in early childhood when she did not receive the loving holding she needed. She expected that there was a benevolent force in the universe, whether her family believed in God or not; but she did not experience it coming to her aid when she needed it. The human environment failed, and no universal force or presence appeared and soothed her. She felt totally on her own, a deeply felt condition that became integrated into her ego structure and now underlies her life and action. She remembers how much she has struggled and suffered, has felt lost and despondent, without the appearance of a true helping or guiding hand. It does not matter whether one believed in God or one was an atheist; these intense feelings arise now as there appears to the soul a universal presence that inhabits and suffuses the whole universe. All the deprivation, loneliness, loss, pain, and frustration from early childhood become channeled now into a form that expresses them in the face of the arising divine love. The old pain and abandonment, with its rage and hatred, appears as this reaction: “Where have you been all this time? If you are so loving and benevolent, why did you not come to my rescue? Why did you let me, my ignorant and inadequate parents, and everyone else I know, suffer miserably without help or even comfort? You have abandoned us all! You are no good. Go away, I hate you! I do not want to see you or hear of you.”6

The process leads to deep hurt and abandonment and the understanding of the origins of the Beast, or hatred of the good, in the early oral frustrations and deprivations. One of the steps in this process of working through is the recognition of how this…

Being is personified; the soul’s relationship to it assumes the form of an object relation between a separate individual soul and a separate powerful entity one may call God. The resolution is the integration of the black aspect of power in a diamond dimension, and the…

The Beast turns out to be a particular crystallization of the ego principle, the conviction about and identification with separateness. Separateness is what truly opposes divine love, and the devil’s hatred is the final natural outcome of such…

The soul disconnected and alienated from Being, especially from its loving light, becomes the prince of darkness. It is important to see that even the Beast is the result of the reaction of the soul to her experience. It is not an ultimate form, nor an eternal one. Hence there is no eternal damnation, and no absolute evil. Resolving the issue of the Beast has a salutary effect on the soul’s relation to her true nature. It opens up a deeper level of appreciation, love, and valuing of essence, and allows the soul to see it as sheer beauty, as what makes everything beautiful. Essence’s value becomes more objective, in the understanding that essence is valuable not because of what it does and gives to the individual soul, but because of its mere existence. True nature, the essence of the soul, is valuable, is worthy of appreciation and love, not because it gives her something, not because it adds to her, not because it liberates her, but because it is beautiful. Its value is in its beauty and perfection. Its truth is its value, and this truth is the essence of all beauty. The…

One can then possess or lose one object or another. And since this dismemberment reflects the absence of the unity of Being, with its richness and abundance, it is bound to be colored by a sense of impoverishment. Impoverishment becomes desire and greed, and possessiveness develops into grasping and attachment. Therefore, instead of the soul experiencing herself living in abundance and seeing richness everywhere, she inwardly feels, consciously or unconsciously, that she is deprived and empty. She ends up being ruled by desire, greed, possessiveness, and attachment.

This worldview is the direct result of not seeing the unity of Being, and not recognizing the inherent richness of its nature. It is actually founded on the perception of reified reality, what we have become accustomed to calling the world, or physical reality. The physical world as we ordinarily see it is basically empty, and populated only by material objects. It is a material reduction of manifestation, with forms that are visible, but without their ground and true nature. This world produces the worldview of ego, the ground for greed and aggression, possessiveness of material objects, and adulation of power. The emergence of divine love challenges this view and highlights the ego structures that embody it. A major form that becomes highlighted at this point is that of a greedy, power-hungry, fat self, a separate self fattened by objects of the world, and interested only in what the reified world promises. Such a self has no spiritual aspirations, and no appreciation for subtlety and refinement, except perhaps for objects that signify material wealth. It is a level of the animal soul, but more exactly a higher structure of this animality. It is an animal in a human form, or almost human.

All ego-selves include this structure; human beings differ only in the degree to which it dominates their overall sense of self. It is the ego structure expressing exclusive cathexis of the physical world, where the soul is caught by the illusion of the world, believing the reified world can satisfy her needs.

The final resolution is the self-realization of divine love: that is, the soul transcends her individual manifestation and recognizes herself as the unity of Being, as the boundless ocean of love and light.

Self-Realization and Personalization

The soul is a particular local form that has the potential to glow much more intensely than physical forms, and more completely than any essential form. It is a manifestation of true nature, embodying its potential and dynamism, but doing so in time and space, in the world of manifestation. It is a particular wave of the ocean of Being, but a special wave. Its specialness is in its potentiality, reflecting the infinite potential of transcendent true nature itself.

Divine love reveals that the soul is an inseparable offspring of true nature, a child of the divine. The soul is a body of light, a drop of grace that embodies the total potential of the transcendent, but in a particular and individual manner. She is a potential necessary for the emergence of further possibilities within true nature. This dimension also reveals that the soul is the expression of the love and grace of true nature, and the carrier of this love in the world of manifestation. The soul is the manifestation that can consciously experience true nature in all

of its fullness and splendor, contemplate its knowledge and mysteries, reflect on its miraculousness and majesty, and celebrate its beauty and magic. The soul is the organ of experience and expression of true nature and, hence, the organ of consciousness of Reality.

18    Being and Knowledge

Here, however, purity is not simply the absence of defilement; it is the absence of differentiated qualities. Pure presence is presence with no qualities, with no discernible color, affect, or taste. It is simply being, with nothing added. It is the simplicity of presence, before presence manifests its qualities and aspects. In a sense, it is like divine love with the love removed, and only the sense of presence or light remaining. But when there are no qualities, the light is not white light. It becomes clear, transparent, colorless light, like clear water or empty space.

Pure Presence

From this perspective it becomes clear that the manifestation of a quality or color adds something to true nature…

When there is color, or quality, one sees the color, or feels the quality, in addition to simply being aware of presence. Hence one’s awareness is slightly divided between the sense of presence and the color or quality. It is not exactly a division, for in essential realization the presence and the quality are inseparable, but the mind can still discern two things, on two ontological levels. They are coemergent and coextensive, but the presence and its quality or color can be discriminated. In pure being, there is no possibility for this discernment, for it is no longer a matter of coemergence. It is singleness, simple unity. This simplicity means total transparency, complete colorlessness. The medium is completely see-through; there is nothing to obstruct the…

Oddly enough, the sense that this pure presence is without qualities does not make it indescribable; we can point to its transparency, simplicity, clarity, lightness, blissfulness, and emptiness. Yet it is free from all the qualities of the essential aspects. More exactly, it is qualitilessness because it transcends the essential aspects and qualities. It is presence empty of any of the differentiated qualities of essence that characterize its aspects. It is essence before aspects, presence before qualities. Instead of richness, there is simplicity; instead of abundance, there is light emptiness; instead of vivid colors, there is transparent colorlessness. In place of the deep fulfillment of divine love there is the unencumbered lightness of being, and in place of the nectary juiciness of pleasure there is the lighthearted blissfulness of simplicity. The transition from divine love,…

The soul is not familiar with such simplicity and emptiness, and may resist it regardless of how wonderful and free it actually is. She has been attached to richness, color, quality, abundance,…

obvious. Since the beginning of her essential development, and even before that, she has loved such rich textures and colors, the…

Pure being is a higher dimension, but she may sense only that it is the loss of essence and divine love. She views transcendence as loss, and responds with many reactions and conflicts. At a deeper level of significance, moving to the simplicity of pure being means to her that she is leaving the world, for the world is a universe of colors and qualities, differentiations and discriminated forms. She feels she is leaving the manifest world, which means both a loss and an abandonment. So she may feel grief and wounding, and/or guilt and self-recrimination. Psychodynamically, leaving the world is equivalent to leaving her mother, for mother is the original object, the original world.

All these reactions, beliefs, and issues are due to the soul’s ignorance of the truth of true nature. The reactions come from what the soul associates with the experiential simplicity of pure presence. Pure presence is a dimension of true nature, and so is divine love. There can be no contradiction between them; in fact, they are simultaneously present, along with the other dimensions, structuring manifest true nature. Thus at some point in the integration of pure presence the soul begins to experience it as inseparable from and coemergent with divine love.

When she surrenders to this manifestation of Being she will realize that pure being does not lack anything. Her fears of loss are simply associations, and are not truly warranted by the experience of pure presence. Remaining with this presence, she recognizes its complete purity.

Nondifferentiated Presence Pure presence is a state of completeness. It is a simple and pure condition that has no excitement, no drama, and makes no big deal about anything. It is the simplicity of fully being oneself. It is being, without any movement out of the completeness and serenity of being. There is no gap in one’s identity, in one’s sense of oneself; in this condition there is no deficiency, no need, no want, no desire, and no fear. This completeness is not arrived at by completing a process or a project; true nature is eternally complete. It is so complete that there is no excitement about the completeness.

The completeness is not a matter of having anything or everything. It is more fundamental; it is the completeness before manifestation. It is the source of all qualities, for these qualities simply emerge out of it, as it morphs itself into these qualities. Awareness of being the source and being perfectly complete discloses then the timeless truth of our essential nature in its original transcendent condition.

The central insight here is that pure presence is nondifferentiated presence. The implication is that it is like white light, and the aspects are like its prismatic colors. However, pure presence is not white, but colorless. It is clear light. It is clear light because it is not a reflected light and not a refracted light. It is a self-existing light, which appears directly in awareness as clear light, and is experienced as pure transparent presence.

Differentiated means not complete; a particular essential aspect has only one element of the completeness of pure presence. We see here that simplicity is actually more complete than richness, even though we might see richness as more abundant. We also recognize here that the deeper we go into our realization of true nature, the nearer we are to its transcendence, the simpler it will appear in experience.

Pure presence, a homogeneous manifold field, structures this manifold by differentiating it into the various forms of manifestation. Manifestation is not something that comes out of true nature; rather it is true nature that spontaneously structures itself into the myriad forms constituting manifestation. Thus it is said that manifestation is coemergent with true nature, a state referred to traditionally as nondual reality. It is

nondual not because it is two making up a unity; rather it is primordially one, one field with inherent patterns that we recognize as the forms of manifestation. It is the nondifferentiated ground where all differentiations appear, the space empty of differentiation necessary for differentiated forms to be seen. So if we penetrate any form, regardless of its size, we will encounter the infinite expanse of true nature.

True nature is perfect in all ways, but it has special perfections that are eternally present in it in an implicit way, the way white light inherently contains the colors of the rainbow. These are the perfections of love, truth, compassion, contentment, peace and so on, the diamond vehicles and other essential forms and dimensions. Being timeless qualities, they are independent of human mind, history, and culture. True nature presents these depending on historical situations, but the qualities themselves are timeless and primordial. True nature manifests them by differentiating its own field into the forms, colors, and flavors implicitly inherent in its pure presence. Such level of differentiation is purely spiritual, forming the objective and true universal realm, and hence hidden to the physical senses. The second kind of differentiation of pure presence is differentiation into the myriad recognizable forms—the physical, emotional, and mental forms. This is the totality of physical manifestation, in all of its levels of structure and process, plus the ordinarily experienced inner forms. So it includes the physical universe with its galaxies, stars, planets, atmospheres, elements, atoms, elementary particles, forces, the bodies of all living creatures, plus the normal experience of these creatures, their sensations, feelings, thoughts, images, and so on. Strictly speaking, the ordinary inner mental forms can be classified as a third level of manifestation, but since they are not timeless and do not reflect the perfections of true nature we include them with the physical forms in one level of manifestation. These two levels of manifestation are coemergent with pure being, which forms the ground level of manifestation, as a pure transparent infinite expanse.

In other words, a differentiated aspect is pure presence clothing itself with the garb of a particular quality. In essential experience we experience both the garb and the garbed, the quality and the presence. The presence is pure presence, but we do not see its purity because it is veiled by the quality. The pure presence is always present, cannot not be present, for it is the ground true nature without which there would be no manifestation and no experience.

Unity and Oneness of Being

We can be aware of manifest forms, but they are external to the presence, as if they are ripples and waves in an infinite ocean of clear light. Pure presence is their inner essence, true nature, and constitutive substratum. And since it is actually the timeless and spaceless, true nature appears in manifest experience as boundless and infinite, pervading everything.

It is possible to discern two types of experience related to pure presence. One is the experience of it as the inner expanse, which is also the nature of everything. This is the experience of unity, in which there is only pure presence. It is easy to understand such experience of unity when we remember that presence is the ontological dimension of any and all forms. If we take any form, the human body for instance, then presence is its being, its very existence.

We can divide until we reach the limit, zero, and it will be existence of the limit. In other words, as we analyze down to smaller, more elementary, simpler forms, pure presence will always appear as the nature and beingness of the form. At the limiting calculus of such an analysis we see that there will remain only existence, only being. There will remain only pure presence. We normally experience this in the form of “pure presence is everything, and everything is pure presence.” We see here that pure being is ultimate being, it is true being.

There is no differentiated form experiencing it in the experience of self-realization. Its purity is its simplicity, which is also its complete immediacy.

We see that it is an indivisible expanse, a single medium with no inner distinctions, similar to the empty sky. The other kind of experience, that of oneness, is experiencing pure presence from the vantage point of the manifest forms. We experience ourselves as the oneness of all these forms, that all the forms constitute one Reality, whose nature is pure presence. We are aware of pure presence as the constituting ground of everything, but we are not in the midst of the expanse of true nature, but in the midst of the surface

The other kind of experience, that of oneness, is experiencing pure presence from the vantage point of the manifest forms. We experience ourselves as the oneness of all these forms, that all the forms constitute one Reality, whose nature is pure presence. We are aware of pure presence as the constituting ground of everything, but we are not in the midst of the expanse of true nature, but in the midst of the surface

of manifestation. In unity, the forms are still visible, but barely, appearing as distant surface phenomena. True nature almost completely outshines the manifest forms. In oneness, true nature and the manifest forms are both strongly present, as two sides of the same Reality. Both unity and oneness are nondual conditions.

Oneness is basically a differentiated unity, a unity in multiplicity. (For further discussion of these considerations regarding this dimension, and other questions, see the second half of Diamond Heart, Book 3 and the first half of Diamond Heart, Book 4.)

Now and Eternity

Movement is basically the flow of differentiations, the succession of different forms that the moving body takes or perceives. Movement is actually a type of change, which is also the flow of differentiations, the succession of different outlines that the particular changing form assumes. All differentiations occur in the expanse of pure presence, as its differentiating self-structuring. Hence, all change occurs in pure presence. This is the case for all kinds of change: action, movement, expression, transformation, evolution, development,…

One important process is the passage of time. We perceive time only by perceiving change. In fact, time is a measurement of change. When there is no change whatsoever, and no movement, then time is at a standstill. In fact, it is easy to see that time is the flow of successive differentiations in manifestation. Therefore, since all differentiations are within the boundless expanse of true nature, time occurs in pure presence. All time—past, present, and future—happens within the expanse of pure…

The present is a differentiation of time, which is a differentiation of pure presence. Thus we experience pure presence as the presence of the present. The presence of the present is now, the nowness of the present. In the self-realization of pure presence, when we are aware of the passage of time, we experience presence as the now. Now includes all differentiations, and hence all the changes in differentiation. Now, therefore, includes all time. It is the now of all time, which we experience as pure presence at any time. The now is not only this instant, it is all instants. More accurately, an instant is a snapshot of differentiation, the next instant is the next snapshot of differentiation, and so on. All these snapshots are differentiations, a flow of differentiations where the awareness of flow depends also on differentiations. All time flows in the now. All time passes now. Now is always, for it is pre-time. It is pre-time because time is differentiation; and now is pure…

The understanding of differentiation of pure presence is an alternative perspective that clarifies different questions. This perspective reveals the objective relation of time to true nature. The experience of the now is not an experience of time. It is not the experience of the present. It is more exactly the experience of pure presence, which can happen only in the present. But since all distinctions and the changes of forms are here differentiations in pure presence, the present is an expression of pure presence. Pure presence is the ground of differentiation, so the now is more fundamental than time. It is actually quite interesting and magical to experience how now extends through all times, how it contains all time. We actually feel our presence as the ground of all, and intuitively…

When we experience ourselves as a form in the now, as when the soul experiences herself as the offspring of Being, we experience…

As an inseparable form of pure presence we are aware of the changes all around us, but because we are constituted by pure presence, time passes us, but does not touch us. We are eternity itself.…

are aware of the passage of time, but feel untouched by it. Timelessness, on the other hand, is the transcendence of time. There is no awareness of time at all, for there is no differentiation, and hence no change. Therefore, time is in the midst of now, but eternity is in the midst of time. But time passes neither on now nor on…

Being and…

Since pure presence is nondifferentiated presence, complete with the totality of implicit perfections of true nature, all essential potentials are present in it undifferentiated from each other. Before the advent of the boundless dimensions the soul experiences these essential potentials in two primary categories. One is the presence of fullness, the other the presence of emptiness. The soul experiences essential aspects in forms like nectars and diamonds, for example, but they normally appear in empty spaciousness. The empty spaciousness is one way that essence manifests, as inner space, of various colors and grades, forming the clearing where the various forms and substances of essence emerge. (See The Void, part four, for a detailed discussion of this point.) We can think of space as a particular essential aspect because it is possible to differentiate it clearly. However, it is not only differentiated from each other aspect, it is also clearly differentiated from all other aspects, making it fundamental in a way that no other aspect is. It functions as the essential clearing or medium where all aspects arise. It functions as a spacious emptiness where the fullness of Being emerges. Its special status becomes objectively clear in the boundless dimensions, especially in that of pure presence.

However, this substantial and full presence is undifferentiated from the emptiness of space. Because of this the experience of full presence on this dimension is indistinguishable from inner spaciousness. Pure presence is at the same time an emptiness, a spaciousness, a nothingness. We feel ourselves, and the whole manifestation, as a fullness of presence at the same time that we feel we are nothing. We simultaneously feel full and empty, substantial and like nothing at all. We are the hereness and fullness of

reality at the same time that we are its immateriality, its insubstantiality,…

We are the solid ground of everything, the true existence of all forms and appearances. At other times, we feel light and empty, like a boundless nothingness. Everything is nothing, where the nothing is what truly is. Nothing has any substance or sense of existence; all forms appear as empty appearances, like a mirage reflected in the clarity of nothingness. We feel like nothing, totally light and empty. But it is a wonderful emptiness, for it is a lightness and delight, a freedom and release. There is no heaviness or depression of any kind, not even the weighty fullness of presence. We are lighter than light, emptier than space, a nothing that is the ground of all things. Sensing ourselves,…

The dimension of pure presence is the beginning of the paradoxes of Being, where logical dichotomies no longer hold. Being and nothing are not two things here, for they have not yet been differentiated for the conceptual mind to make them into a dichotomy. Inner essential space appears…

Yet, we do not sense any inner structuring that will give us the sense of length, width, and depth. It has no coordinates, at least no Euclidean coordinates. It is like a space that has been destructured, that has lost its spatial structuring. We have no sense of orientation and no sense of its absence, no sense of direction and no sense of its absence. It is like an exploding nothing where we have a sense of exploding only because we still perceive forms arising. In some sense, nothingness is the unstructured and unimpeded nature of pure presence. We experience this nothingness psychologically as total openness.

we are completely open, with no limitations, boundaries, restrictions, differentiations, or any recognizable features. We are the total openness of true nature, open for any arising and perception. The openness is both phenomenological and psychological. We feel our presence phenomenologically as sheer openness, nothingness so total that it does not impede anything. Hence, we experience ourselves as lightness, buoyancy, transparency, unlimitedness. This lightness often brings an affect of ever-fresh blissfulness and delight, freedom and release. At the same time we are psychologically open, not resisting anything, not preferring one thing over another; we have no positions or identifications.

little inquiry may reveal to her that it is nothing but her ordinary awareness, the awareness that she has always had, without which there is no perception or experience. She has always known it, for her conscious experience is inseparable from it. Yet she has not recognized it before, partly because she has always exclusively looked at the content of her experience, the objects of her awareness. She has never simply looked at her awareness itself; she has always deeply thought of it as a function, and not an ontological reality on its own. Now she recognizes that this awareness has always been the ground of her perception and experience.

Pure presence is now revealed, felt, and known as the very presence of awakened awareness, the very reality of awakeness. Soul awakens to her true nature, and experiences her presence as the presence of awakened awareness. She is now awake, bright, clear, lucent, and transparent. She is also full of bliss and delight, beyond mind and reflection. She is drunk with awakeness, delighted with lucidity, and free beyond bounds. The primary awakening is the recognition of her ordinary awareness, which has always been familiar to her, as her true nature. Such recognition intensifies ordinary awareness to a phenomenological and psychological experience of awakeness. Ordinary awareness becomes awakened awareness, which now reveals itself to be the true nature of all phenomenal appearance.

has always been with her, in all her conscious experiences, and that she can never lose it. True nature is so near to her that it does not make sense to lose it, an insight that intensifies her joy and delight, and shows her that she has always been free, always herself. She can lose touch with many of the differentiated qualities of her true nature; but its undifferentiated ground is always what she is. Origin of Knowing

Pure presence is undifferentiated, so it has no discriminated conceptual categories. However, one discrimination remains: nondifferentiated presence is conceptualized as presence. Thus this dimension of true nature retains one concept, the concept of being. The fact that we experience it as presence means we recognize it as beingness.

True nature knows one thing here, only one thing. It knows it is. And it knows it is by being. More precisely, nondifferentiated Being is true nature with one concept, the concept of being. This lack of differentiation in pure presence divulges that Being is the original concept, the root of mind and knowing. The first thing that true nature knows is its being, its presence. This knowing is knowing of its being, a knowing not differentiated from its being.

We can say that being is the original knowing, before which there is no knowing. What do we mean here by knowing? Knowing is recognition, apprehension, which implies some kind of concept.

The simplest possible concept, in other words, is the experience of nondifferentiated presence. It is not a thought, not a representational concept, but a direct discriminating awareness of presence, inseparable from the presence. This is pure basic knowledge, basic knowledge before any differentiation.

The timeless truth here is that fundamentally the knower is Being, the known is Being, and the knowledge is Being. We see of course that as cognitive differentiation develops and expands, knowing tends to develop in the direction of discrimination so completely that what is discriminated is experienced as not only discriminated but separate; ultimately this separateness develops to such an extent that knower, known, and knowledge become three distinct things.

Such is the fundamental gnosis, which is the origin of all knowing. To put it succinctly, with being, mind begins.

Universal Concepts

Thus when pure Being differentiates into the perfections of Being, its inseparable basic knowledge also differentiates into the basic knowingness of these perfections. Pure presence is presence because it inseparably includes the knowingness of Being, which knowingness now differentiates into the inherent knowingness of the aspects of Being. The differentiation of presence is spontaneously and instantaneously the differentiation of knowing. Therefore essential aspects arise in the dimension of pure presence not only as differentiated presences, but also as discriminated, knowable qualities.

In fact, one of the ways of connecting to this boundless dimension of pure presence is through the aspects, where a more complete and more precise understanding of the aspect takes the soul into the realization of this boundlessness. For instance, the soul might encounter a particular terror when dealing with this dimension and might recognize after some inquiry that her terror has to do with projecting her own hatred outside her. When she recognizes the projection, she owns up to her hatred. Upon further inquiry she is likely to find that this hatred is a distortion of her power, which then arises as the essential aspect of power. Here it arises as a large, faceted black diamond, with the full quality of presence characteristic of this dimension. She feels a full sense of presence, powerful and immense, yet clear and precise, with an exact understanding of power. She feels she is powerful enough to be herself, that nothing can scare her away from being herself. As she relaxes into this presence, and the presence reveals its wisdom to her as a quality of pure being, she begins to be aware of a nothingness that is undifferentiated from beingness, a perception characteristic of this dimension. The diamond presence expands to reveal the full nothingness and openness of this presence.

The moment we recognize that the aspect is a concept, the transparent black diamond form becomes increasingly nothing, until it fades away. As it fades away we find ourselves to be the boundless presence of undifferentiated being. And we understand that we are not only powerful enough to be ourselves, but that we are boundless power itself; for we are boundless and infinite Being. We can be ourselves; we are not afraid of being ourselves, because we are the infinite Supreme Being itself. This process is repeated for each of the essential aspects, where each aspect appears as a huge, sharp diamond of a particular color and quality. As we directly and experientially recognize that each aspect is a concept, it dissolves and reveals the nondifferentiated ground of pure presence. Each essential aspect reveals itself to be a conceptual differentiation of pure presence, conceptual not in the representational sense but as a discrimination in basic knowledge. Each aspect is a differentiated and discriminated form in basic knowledge.

We refer to these diamonds as “concept diamonds,” for they are actually the original concepts, the original conceptual differentiation of pure presence. We need to stress again that by concept we do not mean ordinary mental and representational concepts, which are elements of ordinary knowledge. We are discussing concepts that precede the personal discursive mind, elements of pure basic knowledge that are free from the reflection of ordinary knowledge. We also refer to them as “no-diamonds,” meaning nothing-diamonds, referring to the fact that they are discriminated differentiations of nothing and also to the fact that because they are differentiations they do not exist independently. They are empty of an independent essence, for their true essence is the boundless pure presence that is the indivisible ground and nature of everything.

Noetic Forms

The various concept diamonds are the diamonds of the vehicle of the diamond guidance in the dimension of pure presence. This vehicle may appear now as the revealer of the truth of this dimension, and of Reality from the perspective of this dimension. It reveals that the dimension of pure presence is that of universal or divine mind, the mind of Being, just as the dimension of divine love is the heart of Being. It reveals what mind is, what cognition is, what thinking is, what reason is, and so on. And it reveals them on their many levels and complexities, as well as the relation between these levels.

However, they are knowable not discursively but directly, as manifestations of basic knowledge. We can know anything and everything here, given opportunity and true capacity, but we can know them directly, immediately, intimately. Because of this we call them noetic forms, referring to the nous of direct knowing. On the dimension of pure presence, manifestation consists of noetic forms, forms capable of precise and sharp discriminating knowing. We can know any form, whether it is a star, a planet, a rock, an animal, an organ of the body, a molecule, an atom, a feeling, a state, a thought, directly and sharply for what it is. If it manifests we can know it. We can know it exactly and objectively, with specific details and minute discriminations. We can know it because it is fundamentally a noetic form, because it is fundamentally knowable.

We find in this dimension the source of all knowing, and all knowability. Pure presence is the cognitive, more precisely the noetic, dimension of true nature, which makes knowing possible. For all knowing is ultimately the knowing of Being, the knowing of isness.

We do not mean here a vague “mystical” kind of knowing, intuitive and impressionistic, but rather a discriminating exact recognition of the form, its qualities, properties and functions, its components and systems, and so on. We see here the possibility for the precise knowledge of objective science.

Universal Mind

knows through the soul, for it needs to be localized for there to be discriminated knowledge of forms. It provides the soul with her knowing faculty, with her mind and intellect, just as the dimension of divine love provides her with her heart and feelings. This means that it is not an individual soul that knows, although that is how things appear. When we know the boundless dimension of pure presence, which is the dimension of pure basic knowledge, we recognize that it is basic knowledge that knows. Basic knowledge is a dimension of true nature, and not limited to the individual soul. It operates through the soul; for the soul is its organ of perception, similar to how the eye is the organ of seeing for the body but it is not exactly the eye that sees.

The expanse is the space of pure basic knowledge, untouched by ordinary knowledge. The expanse functions as the background against and within which noetic forms manifest themselves. All manifestation is simply the expanse of basic knowledge that differentiates itself into the myriad noetic forms. All forms of the phenomenal world appear as noetic forms, forms that knowledge takes.

We live in knowledge, surrounded by knowledge on all sides. There is nothing but knowledge; knowledge inside, knowledge outside, even inside and outside are nothing but knowledge. There are no such things as rocks and mountains, sky and oceans, animals and people. They are all forms of knowledge, noetic forms inseparable from the boundless field of knowledge. We are knowledge, so are all beings, all souls, and all manifestations of Being. When we realize this truth of Reality, all the world begins to shimmer and glow with the light of knowledge. Everything appears not only as an indivisible unity but also luminous and resplendent with the transparent light of knowledge. We see the usual phenomenal forms, but they appear as forms of light, lucent and iridescent and full of color and meaning. The world is meaningful, but not reducible to any specific meaning. It is simply all meaning, all knowledge, true and direct knowledge. There is brilliance, radiance, clarity, lightness, fullness, and presence. The universe is a multidimensional manifold where all dimensions intersect the dimension of knowledge at all their points. Hence, knowledge pervades the whole manifold, making it into a magical self-luminous holographic world of exquisite meaningful deep knowledge. The colors, textures, and flavors of physical objects express the essential qualities themselves, this way the phenomenal world expresses the perfections of Being. The darkness of the night expresses the depth, stillness, and mystery of the black peace essence; the redness of blood and fire reflects the vitality and vigorous energy of the red strength essence; the yellow of the sun and of flowers embodies the lightness and delight of the yellow joy essence, and so on. In such experience the two levels of differentiated forms appear as a unified gestalt, unified by the boundless presence of basic knowledge. The whole universe, appearance or manifestation, appears as mind, but divine mind, universal mind. Nothing falls beyond the purview of this universal mind, for it is all manifestation. We are all in God’s mind, as God’s thoughts; so are all objects both inner and outer. We may recognize here how our individual minds are reflections of universal mind, microcosms of the macrocosmic mind.

Ordinary…

The soul possesses memory, which makes it possible for her to retain impressions of basic knowledge. Her first memories are bound to be of elements of pure basic knowledge, direct and simple experiences and perceptions. However, she cannot retain the fullness of the impression, but most importantly, she cannot retain the knowingness of being. Pure basic knowledge is both protoconcept…

Conceptualizing develops into full-blown formal concepts that refer to categories and categories of categories. Memory can then connect one concept to another, remembering relationships and…

They are abstract because they are further removed from basic knowledge. This activity of abstraction has no limit, and can develop to amazing degrees of abstraction and complexity. We end up with an increasing accumulation of concepts, of various degrees of abstraction, and an amazing network of connections and interrelations. This accumulation is normally called knowledge,…

The individual mind does not only relate and associate memories and concepts to immediate perceptions and experiences, but in time begins to experience and perceive through its ordinary knowledge. For example, the soul’s perception of a sunset is not simple and direct; it includes, in ways that the soul becomes increasingly unconscious about, associations of past experiences of sunsets, the memories and impressions surrounding such experiences, information about…

We have seen that such development dissociates the soul from her true nature by interposing the totality of her ordinary knowledge, which includes all her history of experience, between her and her experience. Experience becomes a combination of basic knowledge and ordinary knowledge, mixed to various degrees. Ordinary knowledge, in particular, develops the patterns of basic knowledge by seeing new connections that allow the emergence of new forms of basic knowledge. Obvious examples are inventions, the development…

Reification Another significant reason for the unavoidable alienation from the presence of Being, related to another characteristic of ordinary knowledge, is that in pure basic knowledge all noetic forms are manifestations of the same ground, differentiations of the same field. They do not appear as separate objects; each forms an inseparable segment of the universal pattern. Their unity is in their omnipresent ground true nature. However, when memory retains an impression of such a noetic form it is generally difficult for it to remember its oneness with other forms. Furthermore, since memory cannot carry the sense of presence, because this sense is nothing but the immediacy of experience, it actually cannot carry the oneness of the form with the rest of manifestation, except perhaps as a vague intuitive continuation of the sense of oneness.

Noetic forms that were initially inseparable components of an infinite pattern, constituting the oneness of Being, end up in the mind as separate objects, composing a dismembered world. The discreteness actually exists only in the individual mind, never in the field of Reality itself. Furthermore, the mind uses these discrete units to view this field, a lens that when finally established gives the mind the impression that basic knowledge is composed of discrete entities. This process is supported and enhanced to completeness, normally in early childhood, when ego development structures the soul using these disconnected and discrete memory elements as building blocks for its structures. The veil through which the soul learns to view her experience does not only function as an intermediary that dissociates her from her sense of presence, but also as an epistemological scalpel that dissects each noetic form from the oneness of Being. Her experience becomes then of discrete objects, which she grows up believing to populate manifestation. The process of turning the basic knowledge of an inseparable noetic form into a discrete object in the mind is referred to as reification. Ordinary knowledge cannot help but reify its experience, and this process of reification seems to be a natural stage in the soul’s cognitive development, necessary for the development of ordinary knowledge and discursive thinking.

The normal mind reifies concepts, which originally are noetic forms inseparable from the oneness of existence. Therefore, ordinary knowledge is composed of a collection of reified concepts. It is important to realize that what is reified is a concept, a concept that is abstracted from the oneness of pure basic knowledge.…

She believes she sees reality as it is, when in fact she is perceiving her own reified concepts. In a very real sense, she lives in her own small mind, or more accurately, within a world structured by the reifications that she projects on it. She is deluded by the belief in discrete objects, a delusion that becomes the basis of her sense of separateness and her deep conviction in it. This…

reality is actually composed of ultimately and independently existing discrete objects, one of…

Inquiry as a Path of…

We now come full circle to the barrier of separateness, the ego principle. We see that the ground of this barrier is reification, for the separate individual self is a reification of the soul. The ego…

It also becomes obvious that a potentially powerful path toward the realization of true nature is one that can penetrate the reifications of the mind and reverse the process of reification. Many wisdom…

The process of the path is an inquiry that attempts to penetrate the boundaries of reified concepts. The inquiry is an exploration to understand the truth of experience, which initially amounts to the truth of reified experience: that is, the understanding of how it is a reified concept, how this reification affects experience and obscures the basic truth. Inquiry leads to the discovery of truth, which unfolds as an ever-deepening understanding of the forms of our experience. This understanding is fundamentally a matter of seeing…

An important element of this inquiry is understanding how one’s history, ego structure, beliefs, and worldview determine and pattern one’s experience. In other words, it is an exploration of how the soul’s ordinary knowledge influences and contaminates basic knowledge. As inquiry penetrates this influence it makes the boundaries of the soul’s reified concepts more transparent, allowing her experience to become more immediate. For as reified concepts become transparent, their original corresponding noetic forms lose the opaqueness that makes them appear as discrete objects. As they become transparent, the light of Being begins to shine…

Truth simply means what the forms of basic knowledge actually are, free from the influence of ordinary knowledge. Because the liberation of basic knowledge from the limiting influence of ordinary knowledge is a gradual process, the revelation of truth is also gradual. Truth shines forth with increasing intensity and brilliance, as the light of basic knowledge, until it reveals itself as the presence of essence. Essence unfolds its aspects and dimensions, supporting and guiding the inquiry and understanding, and showing the soul what it means to experience pure basic knowledge; for essential presence, in any of its qualities, is basic knowledge undefiled by ordinary knowledge. The diamond vehicles further penetrate the reifications that…

the boundless pure presence. Here the aspects appear as the concept diamonds. The concept diamonds, it turns out, specifically challenge and penetrate the reification of essential aspects. For a long time in her journey, the soul cannot help but engage in the process of reifying her experience, including her essential experience. In fact, essence first arises as if within the soul or outside her, as limited forms of presence, because it is arising in a mostly reified field. Hence, it is very difficult for the soul not to reify the essential qualities, and put them in conceptual packages. If this continues without challenge it will ultimately close the door to essential unfoldment. But the true attitude of inquiry, of loving truth for its own sake, keeps this door open, allowing essence to finally reveal its aspects in the form of concept diamonds. These, one by one,…

There is no knowing that is not conceptual, including gnosis, basic knowledge itself. The barrier to realization is the reification of concepts, not their arising. The process of conceptualization is involved in reification, but as we will discuss in the next chapter, it is important to distinguish between conceptualization and reification.

19    Awareness and the Nonconceptual

KNOWING DEPENDS ON PERCEPTION; without perception there can be no knowing. Perception is, hence, more fundamental than knowing. Perception involves the capacity for simple awareness, the sensitivity that makes it possible for us to see, hear, smell, taste, and feel.

This becomes clear when we experience another boundless dimension of true nature, pure awareness. Pure awareness is again a field: boundless, infinite, and continuous. It is similar to that of pure presence, but without the cognitive element. Since the source of cognition is the knowing of being, pure awareness is not a sense of being. We do not experience it as presence, for the experience of presence involves the concept of being or existence. Since pure awareness is a continuous medium or field, we can say it is presence, but it does not feel like presence because it involves no recognition of being or nonbeing. There is only the pure awareness of manifestation, without knowing of what one is aware. Pure awareness is like a mirror that reflects what is in its field but does not recognize or know what it reflects. Pure awareness is the capacity to perceive prior to knowing or recognition. It is implicit in normal perception, in which we perceive and know at the same time. We do not normally recognize this dimension because we always experience it along with the cognition.

In various wisdom traditions pure awareness is referred to as nonconceptual awareness or nonconceptual presence. To call it nonconceptual presence is problematic, for even though it manifests as a field and ground, it is beyond any conceptual category, and presence implies the concept of existence. Pure awareness is free from all concepts, basic concepts and representational ones. There is no knowing in it, neither basic knowing nor ordinary knowing.

Pure awareness is perception without cognition, seeing without recognition, hearing without comprehension. When this level of awareness is dominant in our experience, we can be looking at someone and see a shape and color, lights and shadows, but not register that we are seeing a person, or indeed have any notion about whether there is such a thing as a person. We do not recognize the shape, or even know that there is such a thing as a shape. We see the colors but do not register that there is such a thing as color; we see the lights and shadows, but have no sense or meaning for what we see.

Such a state is not chaotic, not dull, not confused, but the absolute opposite. Recognizing the presence of her true nature as simply a field of awareness, the soul recognizes pure awakeness. She feels awake, bright, and clear, as if she has been perceiving from within clouds, and now she has raised her head above the cloud layer. There is stupendous clarity and inconceivable transparency. She has awakened to her true nature prior to all knowing. Because the presence she experiences now does not include cognition, she can experience her true nature free from all knowledge, all memory, and all association. She experiences a boundless and infinite field pervading all appearance, totally transparent and completely clear. It is simply the presence of awareness, not as a function, but as a field, a manifold, whose very substance is nothing but pure sensitivity, pure perceptivity, pure awareness. There is a vast expanse, transparent and lucent, limpid and bright, which forms the ground of all manifestation.

Pure awareness is similar to pure presence in that it is a nondifferentiated field, but also in being clear and transparent. Its clarity and transparency are more striking, more crisp, and more intense than that of pure presence. This difference brings us the sense of awakening, as if one has awakened from a long sleep, or has emerged from a previously unperceived cloudiness. Also, the absence of knowingness makes us feel bright and awake without any content to this awakening. We feel an intensity, a brightness, a crispness that simply obliterates all thinking and rumination. We become like a transparent light bulb, and the whole universe becomes boundless clear light. Since in pure awareness there is no knowing and no recognition, there is no memory and no association; there is nothing old in the experience. Everything seems as if perceived for the first time, absolutely new and fresh. We do not feel this as newness, because that would be a contrast to something old, but more as a sense of intense freshness, as if our consciousness is pervaded with the crisp, delicious coolness of a mountaintop breeze in winter. We feel cleansed, unburdened, and the cool freshness is an unspeakable ecstasy. A delicious tingle fills the totality of our consciousness. We are awareness, pure and simple, with no memory, no history, no identity, and no heaviness.

Nonconceptual Awareness Pure awareness is presence in the sense that it is a field or medium that pervades everything, and underlies all manifestation. Yet, in the experience itself we do not have a sense of recognition that we are that.

We cannot say awareness exists, yet we cannot say it does not exist. It is both and neither, and not even that.

We might then think that it must be nonbeing, but nonbeing is also a concept, the opposite of being. Being and nonbeing constitute a pair of mutually defining concepts; like all conceptual pairs, neither exists without the other.

One way to arrive at the experience of nonconceptual awareness is through negation. We first negate presence or being, and we experience absence, or metaphysical emptiness. This negation comes not from a denial or rejection or attempt to go beyond, but simply through one’s awareness expanding or deepening past being and presence. Then we negate absence, arriving at nonconceptual presence, which is pure awareness. This occurs experientially in the path of the Diamond Approach, where the student moves from pure presence to pure absence, recognizing the ontological emptiness of presence and all phenomena predicated on presence. The revelation of truth continues to pure awareness, beyond presence and absence. Traditionally, the most common route in this process is the transcendence of the discriminating mind, by going beyond any discriminating cognition and simply pointing to what

Thusness In recognizing that pure awareness is nonconceptual, we discover new and surprising truths about Reality. We see that our being is fundamentally beyond mind, beyond discriminating knowing.

The manifestation is not something apart from the ground, but it is the ground itself. One perceives everything forming an indivisible, boundless, and transparent block of ice, with forms simply as carvings in this block. There is a sense of eternity, for time is also conceptual, but mostly it is the sense of seeing what is, Reality as it is, before memory, association, and commentary. It is the virgin Reality that has never entered time. Discriminating mind cannot enter there, nor thought, nor memory.

The Crystal Dimension We call this dimension of nonconceptual Reality the crystal dimension. The forms of the world appear in this dimension of true nature as shapes and colors nonconceptual presence takes. There is no knowing, but these forms are the same ones that become knowable at the dimension of pure presence.

They are prenoetic just as pure awareness, nonconceptual presence, is prenoetic presence. It ontologically precedes the knowing dimension, but is a ground for it. In other words, all forms appear as fundamentally prenoetic because they can and do become noetic when true nature manifests its noetic dimension. In normal experience, the nonconceptual and noetic dimensions are present simultaneously, for we both perceive and know in the same instant of experience. (See Diamond Heart, Book 4, chapter 16, for a more detailed discussion of noetic and prenoetic forms.)

We cannot tell that they are pure spiritual qualities and the others are physical or emotional, for all forms of manifestation are nothing but a differentiation of the same reality, nonconceptual presence.

We can tell that the pink quality is different from the green one, but we cannot tell that the pink is love and the green is compassion. The recognition of the qualities requires the noetic capacity of the dimension of pure presence.

The crystal aspects and vehicles function partly by challenging various barriers and obstacles to pure awareness, which are mostly conceptual positions taken to be ultimate truths. These positions appear on the conceptual level, but the guidance demonstrates how they become obstacles to the realization of the nonconceptual. As these barriers are understood, the crystals arise as the aspects and vehicles needed for the resolution, but appear as manifestations of nonconceptual presence. In other words, basic knowledge unfolds in such a way that takes consciousness beyond it. One example of such a barrier is the conceptual position that there is a difference between spirit and matter. There is no such distinction on the nonconceptual dimension, but it is such a deeply held dichotomy that most people believe it is an ultimate truth.

All forms are nothing but formations that nonconceptual presence assumes, without them becoming anything else but this presence. The flower is ultimate Reality, so is my ear, so is your nose. The crystal aspects and vehicles manifest to challenge and highlight the conceptual barriers that oppose their corresponding nonconceptual truth, and as they dominate consciousness they move it to the nonconceptual dimension. It is important to see that nonconceptual truth is not mental ideas or images, but the solid bedrock of reality.

It is easy to understand this when we remember that all the boundless dimensions of true nature are coemergent. The noetic dimension is coemergent with the nonconceptual dimension. Experience can be dominated by one or the other, or both.

Transcending Conceptual Dichotomies Much of the work of realization of the nonconceptual dimension is a matter of recognizing the basic mental dichotomies, and recognizing them for what they are. They form the solid bases of our mental universe, and hence function as the final underpinnings of the structure of self and world, a structure that we generally accept as reality. Our ordinary mind adheres to these dichotomies as if they are solid and ultimate reality, unquestionable and eternal. This view of reality inherently supports the structure of the ego-self, for this structure is built using images and representations that are ultimately conceptual, but also depend on the basic dichotomies for their reality.

It is difficult to challenge the fundamental dichotomies, for we cannot see them as conceptual fabrication until we stand on the nonconceptual ground. Only true nonconceptuality, which is the ground of pure awareness, can expose them for what they are, through contrast. Some approaches to realization try to penetrate the conceptual dichotomies through thought and reason, but how can a dimension of being comprehend a deeper and more fundamental dimension than itself? Access to the deeper dimensions is what frees the soul from its inherent limitations of thought.

The most basic fundamental dichotomy is that between being and nonbeing, or presence and emptiness. It is true that presence and emptiness are not simply cognitive experiences in the normal sense of the word. But because we know that we are experiencing presence, which is being, and emptiness, which is nonbeing, it becomes clear in pure awareness that such experiences retain some conceptual colorings.

The sense in which pure awareness neither exists nor does not exist is not related to whether it ultimately appears in experience, but to how it feels in experience. It does not feel like existence and it does not feel like nonexistence. It is both presence and absence, but actually neither, for it is innocent of conceptual coloring.

On the nonconceptual dimension there is only the sacred, and the sacred is not named sacred. It is not named. Yet even though there is only the sacred, this sacred is also the negative, the hostility, the physical, and the mundane. The nonconceptual is such a fundamental ground that no known or knowable category of experience or thought can escape it. It is absolutely sacred, for its purity is never touched by mind or body. It is eternally present, continuously pervading all and everything.

It is particularly difficult to penetrate the dichotomy of being and doing. Many students are able to experience the nonconceptual ground, and to integrate its timeless truths. But most of them find it quite difficult to function from this place. They can be this presence, but when they take action—physical, emotional or mental—they separate from it, and return to a conceptual level. Such disruption of realization can be quite painful and disconcerting; it makes many doubt their realization, and causes some even to believe that their realization is fake. Inquiring into this issue reveals the conceptual dichotomy of being and doing. Quite simply, it is difficult for the mind not to discriminate being from doing, stillness from movement, action from repose.

It can understand and accept pure awareness as presence, and recognize itself as this presence. But to act, to express, to communicate, brings up a dynamic dimension that the mind cannot help but think is distinct from simply being. The inquiry into this dilemma leads the soul to the understanding…

Integrating the wisdom of nonconceptual Reality leads one to include it more and more in one’s everyday functioning. This development is supported by a pearly form of the crystal dimension, leading the student increasingly to recognize the conceptual nature of the dichotomy between being and doing, and to see how in the nonconceptual there is simply no such thing as being and no such thing as doing, no such thing as stillness and no such thing as movement. All these are abstractions from the nonconceptual patterns of perception. When the discriminating mind is not in the foreground, the student may suddenly attain his satori, and his nonconceptual eye is completely opened. He may notice at some point that he is walking, but he finds no difference between that or standing. It feels the same to him; he could be scratching his back, but he feels no meaningful distinction between his hand, his back, the movement of his hand, the itching sensation, and the transparent clear presence. In fact, the question of whether there is a distinction or not does not occur to him until he contemplates his perception. One perceives that the boundless presence is what does everything; more exactly, the boundless presence is everything, including the movements and actions. More precisely, there is no such thing as movement and action; there is only Reality, fresh and virginal, beyond any description. To integrate…

The most frequently noted dichotomy on the way toward nonconceptual freedom is that of good and evil, or more exactly, good and bad. Without concepts there is no sense that one thing is good and another is bad. First, there is no separation between forms, because separation happens only through the reification of concepts, and there are no concepts here to reify. Because of this there cannot be a comparison between them, all forms are equal in being pure awareness. Second, since there is perception of difference between forms but no recognition of what the difference is, it is not possible to value one form and not another. All appear equal. The moment we recognize something as good in contrast to something else as bad, we are definitely existing in the…

Experientially, the notions of good and bad are connected mostly to pleasure and pain, happiness and suffering, gain and loss, expansion and contraction, and so on. In the unutterable bliss of nonconceptuality, these dichotomies disappear. An important part of this process for the soul is the development of nonattachment. The understanding that arises with the help of the crystal vehicles is that attachment depends on the dichotomy of good and bad. These vehicles teach the soul that nonattachment is nothing but the effect of the nonconceptual presence on the consciousness of the soul. They teach her this wisdom by…

The soul has the opportunity at this point to perceive the development of attachment. It starts with the differentiation of nonconceptual presence. As long as these stay simply as differentiations no attachment is possible, but the differentiations become discriminations, knowable concepts. As long as they remain simply knowable concepts, noetic forms, attachment is still not present. But the concepts become labeled and eventually reified. They become discrete forms, which obscures the unifying ground. The labeling and reification make it possible for the first time to compare the forms, resulting in judgment. This judgment is the beginning of the dichotomy of good and bad. This judgment leads to preference, generally of the good over the bad. Preference based on the entrenched belief…

Understanding attachment, and the freedom from attachment that arises through the impact of nonconceptual presence, liberates the heart from its habit of orienting according to fixed preferences. The heart becomes transparent to the operation of essential intelligence, functioning from a ground of nonattachment. Its love and joy are now free, totally unattached. It can love fully without having to possess what it loves, liberating its joy and delight, which become the celebration of Reality, immaculate presence, and pristine awareness. The soul learns from direct experience that nonattachment is nothing but the nonconceptual presence in the heart, as the heart of enlightenment, the crystal heart. Such heart responds openly,…

As the discriminating mind dissolves under the impact of nonconceptual presence the dichotomies merge into each other, and all polarities reveal their underlying unity…

Beyond Oneness We saw in the previous chapter that pure presence is the dimension of unity of existence, which appears in various degrees of unification. We discussed unity free from multiplicity, and oneness that is unity in multiplicity. Unity and oneness are the most well-known mystical experiences, but as we move into the nonconceptual realm we begin to see the concepts that are still attached to true nature in these perceptions. To perceive that all forms make up a unity, that they are not separate and discrete objects, but a unified field, indicates the presence in our consciousness of the dichotomy of the one and the many, and that of oneness and separateness. In other words, to experience oneness is to still experience true nature through a concept, the concept of one, as contrasted to many. One and many is a basic conceptual…

Yet, we do not experience oneness, we do not feel that everything is one. It is not that we feel everything is not one, but rather that we do not experience one and do not experience not one. There is no one and no many in nonconceptual awareness. There is just the suchness of things, or more accurately, it is thus. Reality as such is neither a oneness nor a multiplicity, but an indivisible truth that we experience without thinking it is an indivisible truth. The experience of unity and oneness is simply the contrast to that of separateness and multiplicity. In…

A related dichotomy is that of duality and nonduality. Some refer to Reality as nonduality, to emphasize that there is no separateness between observer and observed, manifestation and source, and so on. Yet, in reality there is no such thing as nonduality. Nonduality is the creation of the discriminating mind, just as duality is. At best, it is a…

One dichotomy whose dissolution many find difficult to assimilate is that of meaning and meaninglessness. People feel that they need meaning in their lives, that without meaning reality has no value and no significance. In fact, some individuals kill themselves when they fail to find a sense of meaning in their lives. Yet, meaning, any meaning, is not ultimate. The inner journey leaves all meaning behind…

At the stage of recognizing true nature, the soul realizes that it is the ultimate meaning of existence and of life. She understands that when she is not in touch with her true nature her mind thinks of it as absence of meaning, which she then tries to find, pursuing a particular style of life, philosophy, activity, or interest. As she realizes her essence she finds that the…

But at the stage when the soul moves to the nonconceptual, even being is gone, for being and nonbeing are both conceptual. She may first see this as meaninglessness, as the sense that life has no meaning. Meaninglessness becomes the true condition of things, for any meaning is simply a story the discriminating mind concocts. But precise inquiry into this meaninglessness reveals it to be simply the transcendence of the concept of meaning. Meaning requires recognition, cognition, and now we are simply beyond that. Reality is simply thus, pure awareness without commentary. In other words, to see Reality as ultimately meaninglessness, even when this is idealized as total freedom, is to still view it within the concept of meaning. Reality is neither meaningfulness nor meaninglessness, neither the presence of these nor their absence. It is simply independent of…

Enlightened…

The dichotomy of purpose and purposelessness is related to that of meaning and meaninglessness. Before we realize nonconceptual truth we find it important to have purpose in our life, and purpose gives meaning to our existence. Yet, to have purpose indicates the adherence to meaning, and to the belief that our life can have a good or bad direction. It involves the conviction that we can see a movement from a cause to a result, from one type of action to another, and that this movement is ultimately real. Because of this, we can judge the direction of our life, and gauge our success in accomplishing our purpose. This in turn becomes attachment and suffering. In appreciating the nonconceptual dimension of true nature, we understand that such discrimination is not ultimate, that when we realize true nature we are free, and this freedom transcends any purpose. We actually discover that we need purpose because we have not…

In the realization of the nonconceptual dimension, we do not experience purpose in life, nor do we experience the need for it. In fact, we do not even experience purposelessness, for Reality is beyond both. We do not strive toward anything, and do not aspire toward any result. We have no motivation, but act intelligently and compassionately. We act this way not because we want to, not because we have compassion or love as our motivation, but because we are true nature, and true nature is the source of such qualities. It acts the way it acts, always in a nonconceptual perfection, but when we cognitively contemplate this action we think of it as loving and compassionate. In other words, one who is realized in the nonconceptual does not experience himself to possess a motivation for action, and does not feel a purpose for his life, but looked at from the outside people will think that such an individual…

What is traditionally referred to as purposelessness and motivelessness, and sometimes as indifference, but more accurately understood as the transcendence of purpose and motive, is not something to try to emulate. One cannot say that there is no such thing as purpose and motivation, and that it is therefore fine to live a haphazard and meaningless life. That attitude would abrogate one’s human nature, for as long as one still lives in the cognitive sphere one’s life requires purpose and meaning. Purpose, motive, and meaning are necessary for human beings, because they are emissaries of the timeless truths of nonconceptual Reality, before they are recognized for what they are. Only when we have integrated the nonconceptual can we say we do not need…

Universal Heretic To be established in the nonconceptual is to attain an inconceivable freedom. The soul realizes her nature in such a way that she does not need to know what it is. She does not need to know she is enlightened. She is beyond the concept of enlightenment and liberation. She is innocent, not knowing she is enlightened, and not caring to know. She has attained liberated indifference, for the fullness of realization takes her to such…

One is, Reality is thus, and one goes about one’s business. The aspirant’s mind is open and free, totally unencumbered by any position, philosophy, or system. He has no perspective that he takes to be ultimate and final. Yet, he is free to use any system. Since he is established in the nonconceptual he sees all perspectives for what they are, conceptual perspectives, and hence not ultimate truth. But because he can use his discriminating mind, he can see when a given perspective is useful or necessary for some functioning or teaching, and is free to use it. Nevertheless, he uses it without having to believe it is ultimate and can drop it whenever it becomes unnecessary. He needs no perspective for his own experience, for he lives where no perspective can enter. Although he understands the need for the…

He is free from all positions, and the need for positions. He may have a system or a detailed teaching, but he recognizes that truth is beyond any such system, and cannot be captured by the conceptualization of any teaching. He uses one system or another, a particular conceptualization or another, because he knows how to use it well, and not because he believes it is the most correct, or that it is ultimate or final in any way. He understands that the point of any teaching is liberation and realization, and not any system or teaching. In fact, he recognizes that all teachings, even the most sublime paths, are simply stories; their sacredness is in their effectiveness and not in the tenets…

He needs to faithfully follow the teaching, for a real teaching is the objective manifestation of true and essential knowledge, the nous of true nature. Yet, to be fully liberated he must go beyond any knowing, and his realization must be independent of his discriminating mind. This will be possible only if he does not adhere to his path as the final description of reality—not because the description is necessarily wrong or inaccurate, but because true nature is ultimately beyond any description, any system or teaching.…

He realizes that Reality is not a description, and that any description, any teaching or belief system, regardless how useful and accurate, falls short of Reality as it is.

He believes in nothing, and adheres to no teaching or religion as final and ultimate. He has become a universal heretic, embracing all, yet free of all.

One attains here a certainty beyond doubt, because it is independent of belief, of knowledge, and of any intellectual or experiential category. One is oneself, and sees Reality as it is, with a nonconceptual conviction. The person’s realization has gone beyond knowing and, hence, beyond any doubt or questioning. It is not that he feels certain because he is convinced, for he is beyond convincing. He is not convinced of anything, not even of the truth of his own personal and ascertained experiences and perceptions. He is certain because there is nothing to be certain about, and nothing to doubt. In fact, there is no such thing as doubt, for the mind that doubts is the discriminating mind. This realization becomes what we call certainty only when he contemplates it

conceptually. He understands that certainty is unquestionable only when it is nonconceptual, when it is not certainty about anything, but simply the solidity and rootedness of one’s realization of nonconceptual truth. With such nonconceptual certainty he does not need to gauge or rate his realization according to any teaching or wisdom tradition. His realization is totally autonomous, and he accepts it with its uniqueness, just as he accepts the uniqueness of other teachings and realizations. He is free, and this freedom is unutterable delight and uncontainable joy.

Master of Knowledge

However, this dimension inherently presents its differentiations as discriminations, as noetic forms. In other words, the possibility of reification will always be present because of the very nature of the dimension of pure presence. The mere fact that pure presence includes forms that can be known, makes its realization insufficient for total freedom. Our mind will naturally reify noetic forms, and such reifications will ultimately alienate us from our essential presence and dismember its boundlessness. Pure presence can take us beyond ordinary knowledge and penetrate its reifications, but the tendency for reification will remain. As long as the mind is present, and can recognize forms, it will reify them. It will even reify omnipresence, even though it is not a form with shape and size. To go beyond the tendency for reification we need to go beyond the mind that reifies, and beyond the concepts that can be reified. In other words, freedom from reification can be total only when we do not see any concepts, only when we do not recognize any forms. And this can happen only on the nonconceptual dimension of true nature.

Pure presence penetrates these representations by showing that they are reifications, revealing the omnipresence that underlies and constitutes all forms. Yet the tendency toward reification does…

The separate self will continue to arise, less rigid and opaque. When true nature presents its nonconceptual dimension, we begin to detect a deeper source of this sense of self. We see that the soul cannot be completely free from the shell of reifications because as long as there are concepts available to it the mind will reify them to create such a shell. Nonconceptual presence exposes the ego identity, the shell of the separate self, as composed not only of reifications but of concepts. We realize that every time we recognize ourselves, even when the recognition is basic and immediate knowing, the mind takes the concepts of this recognition and builds reifications that then coalesce into the shell of ego. Understanding this level of the creation of the shell of self we realize pure awareness, and our being and identity become established as nonconceptual presence, beyond mind and concepts. We are, without knowing what we are. In fact, we do not even know we are. We simply experience freedom, without recognizing it as freedom. We are…

Crystal guidance functions in another, unexpected way. Beyond the exposing of concepts and dichotomies, its crystalline structure illuminates barriers that developed before the arising of conceptual knowledge. These are the structures of the soul that were established very early in life, before the cognitive capacity developed enough for the establishment of representational structures. We discussed these primitive, prenatal, and preverbal structures in chapter 14. These structures are simply impressions in the soul; they are not cognitive. Because…

In reality, essential guidance can operate with all the dimensions of true nature, for it is the expression of true nature. It can operate with one dimension, or with two or more of the dimensions, in coemergence. Depending on the need of the inquiry, one dimension may dominate, and in the gradual inner unfoldment one dimension after another dominates in its functioning. Thus we see how the dimensions of pure presence and pure awareness function conjointly in the inner guidance. When the soul fully understands and integrates the dimension of pure presence, she becomes open to all knowledge, to all the timeless wisdom of Reality. When she attains the dimension of pure awareness, she goes beyond knowledge, and attains nonconceptual freedom. She is now free from the constraints of knowledge. However, if she has been able to realize both dimensions and integrate them in her realization, she will be free to use knowledge without constraints, and without danger of reification.

20    Logos and Creative Dynamism

We feel a sense of presence and fullness, at the same time that we are aware of powerful dynamism and the sense of flow. The full presence is boundless, infinite, and at the same time luminous and alive. It is a conscious presence where awareness and the fullness of presence are inseparable, making up one unified field of consciousness.

We perceive the various objects and phenomena flowing together in a manner where there is no contradiction, no opposition, no collision, no competition, no jostling, no confusion, no interference, and no enmity.

Optimizing Force

It can show us the truth and reality, and the possible optimizing direction, of such things as human relationships in their various forms, such as love relationships, marriages and divorces, friendships and work associations. It can reveal to us the wisdom regarding destiny, connection, union, even the various degrees of union with God. It can also reveal to us the wisdom of how to grow, develop, mature, evolve, and so on, and how to unfold knowledge and deepen heart. Because it is the harmonious order of all phenomena, it can guide us toward optimization of all concerns of human life, and of life in general.

The Unmanifest

The unfoldment of the logos is an outflow, a cosmic articulation, a speaking of the Word. All movement must occur against a background of stillness, and all speaking against a background of silence. Stillness and silence are the first properties of the unmanifest that the soul normally encounters in her inner journey. By simply witnessing the process of manifestation, and not going along with the normal enmeshment in the forms it assumes, the soul may find herself outside of her individual form, as the background against which all change and movement occur. She is then simply a silent witness, unmoving and immovable, a vast expanse underlying the process of continual creation. In this process we discover a deeper dimension than the logos, deeper than all other boundless dimensions, a dimension of true nature that forms the ultimate ground of the other dimensions and the ultimate ground of all things. We discover where the unfoldment happens, which turns out not to be a place; we discover the source of all manifestation, which is also its ultimate and absolute nature.

We are prior to all manifestation, the source from which creation emerges, and the mystery to which it returns. We are the beginning and the end of everything, the truth without which there will be no awareness, and no experience. We experience ourselves as a vastness, an immensity, an expanse so deep it is absolutely dark. Though dark and still, inscrutable and silent, it is the source of all luminosity and light. And within this immeasurable immensity, we witness the process of creation.

The light is the unfolding logos, whose pattern is the totality of existence, a dynamic unified manifold. The scintillating light is one unified surface, with no parts and no partitions, a field of radiance full of intelligence and truth, reality and significance.

We feel unknown and unknowable, and in front of us phenomena appear with functioning. There is awareness of phenomena and functioning, but there is no involvement in it whatsoever. It does not feel like there is someone observing or aware of phenomena. It is as if Reality has two sides. The front is all of existence, the back is the darkness of the absolute. All of appearance, as the divine logos or being, is seen as external to the absolute. There is no one who feels he is doing. The doing is present, without being related to doer. The interesting thing is that there are functioning and perception without a sense of self. We realize that usually there is a continuous sense of self or “I.” Now there is experience and perception of experience, but it is not related to an “I.” The experience is far or distant from who I am, without who I am feeling like an “I.”

Such experience depends on being completely in the present, where the mind is not thinking of other places and times, but is totally focused in the here and now. The mind is free of its normal knowledge, with all of its details about reality and the world. So there is only the perception of the here and now; everything that lies beyond is a mystery, unknown and magical. We realize that as far as perception goes there is only the here and now; everything else is memory and accumulated knowledge. And when memory is not filtering our experience, we directly perceive what is, the luminosity of the unfolding logos pattern, transparent to its underlying truth, the inscrutable brilliant darkness of the absolute. It is clear in such experience that there is only the now, that the now is not caused by the past, but is continuously generated out of the absolute. There is the certainty that there is no continuity in time and no movement in space and time. There is only the continual manifestation of appearance, as a cosmic and universal act, all at once. There is absolutely no room in this perception for individual action. There is only cosmic continual appearing, beyond which is the mystery of the absolute. There is only the now, which is not continuous with the past, but with the absolute as source.

As we abide in the inscrutable darkness of the absolute we recede, as if backward, from the world of manifestation. The soul feels: “I am perceiving the world and knowing I am not of it, not part of it, and not in it. When I reflect I do not find myself, either as a person or self. It seems I am some kind of emptiness that does not have any particular feeling, even of self. There is awareness of phenomena, but I am not part of what I perceive, and I am not anything in particular. I am pure subject, which is not an object. I am the source of awareness. I am not the witnessing, but I make witnessing possible.”

Cessation Beyond this experience, all light disappears, all awareness ceases. There is no perception of anything; there is simply no experience.

We are here the absolute, the luminous night, witnessing appearance arising within it, out of it, but we still experience ourselves as the immense stillness and stupendous silence underlying all existence and all appearance. We feel fresh and clear, as if our consciousness has dipped into the cleansing energies of the source, and returned renewed and rejuvenated. This is similar to the rejuvenation we experience after deep sleep, except we are here clear and awake, bright and lucid.

Such dissolving is usually gradual, feeling like a delicious melting, a wonderful and lovely embrace. However, this experience is quite informative, for it reveals further mysteries of the absolute. As the consciousness of the soul thins away, she recognizes the effect of the surrounding blackness and nothingness on her presence. She feels herself as a thin and dispersed mass, so delicate and so fine, as if she is composed of the most minute atoms. Each atom is conscious of itself and of the surrounding emptiness. Each experiences itself as presence, and the surrounding emptiness as the absence of presence. In other words, the surrounding darkness is not only the absence of light and consciousness, but also the absence of presence and being.

The source is a mysterious nonbeing, a nonbeing that is not simply an ordinary nothing, but a metaphysical nonbeing that holds the potential of all possibilities of existence and experience. It is a breathtaking truth: the source and ultimate nature of all existence is nonexistence. Being, with all of its richness and variety, is born out of nonbeing.

Selflessness

Therefore, the absolute is the absence of all the components that give us the sense of self. The silence and stillness of the absolute means that there is no inner content, no inner forms, not even sensation. There is absolutely nothing upon which to base a sense of self. There is no sense of boundary or image, no sense of center or existence, and hence nothing to give us the feeling of self. We experience ourselves as totally selfless, completely devoid of self. There is absolutely nothing, and such nothing is the source and nature of all our manifestations; it simply witnesses them.

Because there is no inner content, not even sensation, there is nothing to reflect back on. The moment we reflect on ourselves, and look inward, there is nothing to perceive. Our awareness simply comes back to awareness of “external” phenomena. In other words, in the experience of ourselves as the absolute there is no self-reflection; in fact, the possibility of self-reflection disappears. Reality has a front and a back, phenomena are the front and the absolute is the back. However, since the absolute is actually nonbeing, Reality becomes simply the front. There is no back. There is no back to reflect on, no inside to look into. We are the freedom of the world, the liberation of all manifestation. Alternatively, there is total absence of self-consciousness, on all levels and in all senses of the word. There is no awareness of self, and no knowing of this lack of awareness. This phenomenological absence of self-awareness becomes a psychological or emotional absence of self-consciousness. We cannot be self-conscious, because there is no self to be self-conscious and no self of which to be conscious. And without self-consciousness there are no personal issues or conflicts, no personal suffering. The most interesting part of this lack of self-consciousness is the experience of spontaneity. Without self-consciousness there is no self-watching and no cautiousness about our expressions and actions. There is no premeditation and no rumination about what to do. Hence we are totally spontaneous, like young children. We are totally open and innocent, with no defensiveness and no strategizing. There is no holding back, no hiding, no protection, no pretension. There is complete openness, presence, and genuineness. There is no self-control whatsoever. So the spontaneity is total. The absence of control is absolute. We simply experience ourselves as freedom, lightness, delight, openness, and spontaneity. Without self-consciousness, action and expression are absolutely spontaneous, and hence totally free.

Emptiness

The more important observation is that as the rock becomes transparent to its true nature our experience of it also changes in terms of substance. The rock not only looks transparent, it feels insubstantial. We lose our normal sense of it being a solid object, substantial and real. In other words, the sense of physical solidity, substantiality, and rock-like reality are also the result of cognitive filters. When we reify this particular form of appearance, separate it from the rest of manifestation, and think of it as an independently self-existing object, such cognitive conclusion imbues our perception of the rock with the feeling of substantial solidity.

From the perspective of the absolute, all manifest forms possess this insubstantiality and lightness, and all in the same degree. It is not as if rocks are insubstantial but more substantial than water. When it comes to the absolute perception they are all equal in their insubstantiality; this insubstantiality is simply our perception of their ontological ground, which is the same absolute everywhere. They are all totally insubstantial, for their ultimate status is nonbeing. More accurately, all forms are a coemergence of two things: appearance and nonbeing. Their appearance is their being, but their ground is nonbeing. Their appearance-presence is always accompanied with their nonbeing. They cannot be without nonbeing, for the nonbeing of the absolute is the ground of their being. Such understanding is totally paradoxical for our thematizing ordinary mind; but it is actually how things are, and how we will perceive them when we are free from all cognitive filters. The absolute demonstrates that there is no ultimate substance, for whatever substance we find will have to possess nonbeing as its final nature and constituency.

The traditional term for the ultimate absence of substance, solidity, realness, and existence is emptiness. To be empty, a form is void of ontological substance, solidity, realness, and ultimate existence. Emptiness is a name for the absolute, which points to one way of experiencing it, or to its most significant truth. To recognize the absolute as the ultimate ground of all objects and phenomena is to perceive their transparency, insubstantiality, and lack of ultimate being. Instead of opaqueness we experience a transparent expanse, spacious and open. Instead of substantiality we experience a lightness, a freedom, a total absence of heaviness. Joy is released, and contentment fills the heart.

Crystalline Absence

We feel absolutely certain of this truth and that there can be nothing beyond it or transcendent to it. But it is also easy to see why it is the absolute dimension of true nature. If there were any other dimension it would have to arise in awareness; otherwise there would be no way of knowing of it. However, for a dimension or truth to arise in awareness puts it in the realm of the manifest, and the absolute transcends all the manifest.

We conceptualize true nature differently, as consisting of five dimensions, with the nonbeing dimension as the absolute. The fact that it is the unmanifest means that it is truly the only unchanging truth, for everything else is a manifestation out of it. We will also see that in some very deep sense there is only the absolute. The absolute is not only the ultimate nature of everything, but is itself everything. This is a very subtle insight, part of the understanding of the journey of descent. What is significant here is not what name we give to this mystery, but the fact that it is the most fundamental dimension of true nature we experience.

This is part of the mystery of true nature, which appears as the ultimate mystery of the absolute. Experientially we recognize both pure awareness and the absolute as nonconceptual. Yet they are phenomenologically different. They differ as day differs from night. Pure nonconceptual awareness is clear, colorless, transparent light that feels like the coemergence of presence and absence. We see a vast expansive space, clear and colorless, bright and limpid. It is a space full of light, just like space in daylight. Yet, it is also a presence with the sense of solidity and fullness.

When we are precise and exact in our understanding of the absolute nature, the solidity can attain a faceted and crystalline quality. We experience ourselves then as a crystalline absence, a clear and absolutely transparent immensity. This experience is completely paradoxical. We feel totally solid and full, with crystalline sharpness and clarity, yet simultaneously we feel so light, so empty, so not there, that we are the absolute absence of anything. We are both simultaneously, a quality of experience completely incomprehensible to the conceptual mind.

When we experience the absolute through the mind modality, it attains the greatest subtlety. It is total absence, with the slightest hint of presence. The presence is like a subtle glimmer to the absence, giving it a slight sense of presence that easily melts into nonbeing. The lightness is greatest here, so much freedom, so much space, so much openness. We are so free we are almost not here; it is like we have overcome gravity and feel no more heaviness of any kind. Even the slight, almost absent, sense of presence can attain a crystalline quality that gives it precision and brilliance. We feel so free and so awake, so clear and so bright; yet there is nothing there: total selflessness.

Nondimensional Truth

When we understand the nondimensionality of the absolute, we understand that the more open we are the more we are in touch with the nonbeingness of our true nature. The openness is the external manifestation of this nonbeingness. But nonbeingness is not an expanse; it is nothing at all, so how can it possess extension? It has no extension at all, it completely transcends the concept of distance.

We perceptually see the other at a distance, but feel no sense of distance; in fact the concept of distance is transcended. It is like our individual souls are spokes of the same wheel, but are aware of themselves only at the rim. At the rim it appears as if there are many souls, with distance between them. But when they become aware of their depth, at the center of the wheel, they feel no distance between them, for they are identically one. We experience ourselves as the other, totally. More precisely, we experience our inside as the inside of the other, the center of our heart as the center of the other’s heart. We are the same identity, the same essence, which is the absolute. But this essence, because its nature is nonbeing, has no extension. In other words, we experience our true self the same as the true self of the other, and it feels more like an extensionless point. Imagine the kind and intensity of love possible here. Love is the appreciative attraction between two forms of manifestation because of the pull of their true nature, which is one nature. The fact that it is one nature makes us feel this appreciative gravitational pull toward others. The pull is simply the indirect experience of the underlying unity, felt through the veil of varied manifestations. Now, since this nature has no extension, and no distance, imagine the amazing gravitational pull it exerts on two beings who are in touch with this nondimensional truth. They perceive spatial distance between them, but feel no distance at all. It is the most pure, the most intense, the most ecstatic, and the deepest possible love. It is the gravitational pull to be one point, a point of nonbeing. It is the appreciative and ecstatically transporting attraction that wants to dissolve all barriers to such singular unity. It is the attraction-desire to completely melt into each other, to melt together into complete nonbeing.

The Mystery

After some time of attempting to understand it and to penetrate its secret we cannot help but be bewildered and bedazzled, and throw up our hands at the futility of our endeavor. We are awed and humbled, but this awe and humility turns out to be the true understanding of its nature. We may arrive at the realization that to truly understand its nature is to recognize it is indeterminate; we can even say it is actually the principle of indeterminacy. In other words, the absolute is the indeterminate truth that underlies all determination; it is the source and potential of all determinations. All manifestation is simply determination, for each form is a determinate one, as is each quality and dimension.

We behold a mystery that we passionately wish to know, and we know that to know it is to cease being, yet we long to be embraced by its annihilation and love, to be taken in by its cessation. To know it is to cease, and to cease is to know it. To know it is to not know it, but to not know is to know it. To know it is to know it as mystery. It is the mystery that must remain a mystery, which cannot but be a mystery. Its being a mystery saves us from the obsessions of our mind, and from the false securities that our false self thrives on. We behold it as mystery, a mystery that by remaining a mystery liberates us from the traps of the manifest world. We learn to live in mystery, to be supported by ultimate insecurity, and to love the flavor of nonbeing.

Everything reveals something about the mystery, but nothing reveals everything. By revealing something it takes us closer to it, and by its limitations it invites us to greater knowledge and understanding. We keep learning and moving deeper; the more we know the more we see that we do not know. For to move nearer to the mystery is to know it further; but to know it further is not to know it, but to see its mystery. We learn that the whole universe, with all its manifest forms and dimensions, partakes of its mystery, for the universe is its appearance, its apparel, its offspring. Indeterminacy is the nature of existence because this existence reflects its source, the principle of indeterminacy. And when we know completely, when our knowledge is totally objective, we fully know it. Yet this knowing is the knowing of absolute mystery, and is our fulfillment and liberation.

Home

When we learn to accept the mystery that lies all around us, and to recognize that what we know, regardless how immense, is nothing but a blip in an ocean of darkness,

we give up the search for security, we relax and let go. We learn to live in mystery, and recognize that the world we live in is full of mystery. We learn to love to know, for it is the knowing of this mystery; but at the same time we learn to love the mystery, for it is the rest of our hearts and the home of our souls. To know is to move nearer to our home, and to behold the mystery is to be at home.

We recognize this without anyone telling us, for in our hearts we have always known. Our minds have told us various stories about where home is, where rest is, where contentment is, but now we know with certainty that we are home at last, and wonder how we came to be lost. We feel like celebrating, full of joy and dancing with delight.

The Beloved We find that home is the inner of the inner, in the most secret chamber of our heart. When we discover the absolute in our heart, which is a particular realization of the absolute, we find out that it is what our heart has always been looking for. (See The Point of Existence, chapter 41, for a discussion of the process of finding the absolute in the heart.) We learn that we have been erecting idols in our heart, when our heart is in reality the Kaaba, the throne of the divine essence, the absolute.

It deepens and expands, for we see how much beauty and majesty our earthly love reminds us of, and expresses to us. In other words, we realize that we love others and objects because we see something in them that expresses our true beloved. We have earthly love because all manifestation is the appearance and body of our true beloved. Now our love affair is consummated and fulfilled. Our ecstatic and passionate love of the mystery draws us powerfully to its depths, and its annihilating love for us draws us deeper into its nonbeingness. We meet in the heart, the soul consumed with passion, and lovingly annihilated in the beloved’s embrace. We become one, a crystalline luminous beauty, sable black and charming beyond description. Musk fills the air, and the scent of roses announces the total marriage.

Depth We realize that our beloved is in the most absolute depth of our soul. We discover that our beloved is not only in the depth, but is the depth of our soul. We learn that the absolute is pure depth, depth with no end. The darker it gets the deeper we feel, and the more profound is the truth.

Ipseity The absolute is such a mystery that even though it is total selflessness it is also the ultimate self. What can that mean? We have seen that the absolute is the divine essence, the inner essence of Being. It is the final nature of everything, including ego and essence. It is the absolute nature of the soul, her deepest ground. To realize it is to recognize in direct experience that there is nothing that is not constituted by it. We feel we are constituted by it, that it forms our very substance and identity.

The experience is of I as the ipseity, an infinite luminous night. And I, the mystery of ipseity, see the world of appearance as a luminous and smooth oneness. The oneness is of the logos, which looks smooth, luminous, and transparent. I am the ipseity, and the harmony of oneness is my robe. Joy and happiness fill the field of experience, joy at seeing the emergence and dominance of the ipseity, and happiness to know myself as the ipseity, the self that is the source and nature of everything. This experience is the end of a very deep differentiation between the concepts of self and nature.

End of the Search When the soul arrives at her absolute home, recognizes her true beloved, and realizes it as her ipseity, many insights, realizations, and feelings spontaneously arise. One’s life begins to show its overall pattern, seen from the perspective of the inner journey home. This culminates in the personalization of the absolute ipseity, where we learn to be a human being, a person, and to still abide in the absolute. This is an unusual and rarely known realization, where the vastness of the mystery, without ceasing to be the mystery, finds itself walking with two legs, touching with human hands, speaking with a mouth, and so on. (For the details of this process of personalization, see The Pearl Beyond Price, chapter 38.) At this point the soul is surprised by new feelings and realizations that occur spontaneously, as if brought home by the power of the self-realization. What spontaneously arises, without self-reflection or reasoning, is the feeling that the soul is at the end of a certain phase of life and work.

She begins to feel completely relaxed and settled. Upon inquiry she feels she has reached her destination, even though she did not know it was the absolute that she was looking for. There results a sense of having lots of time, energy, and space to spare. She may feel willing and happy to give her time and energy to others. She feels at home now; her search is ended. It is as if she has been on a journey, searching for her beloved and her true home, but she did not know it consciously, at least she did not think of it in these terms.

Fulfillment saturates her experience, and she begins to experience a new order of contentment. Her contentment and happiness cease to be primarily caused by life happenings, for it is now the natural condition of the heart that has found its beloved. She feels mature, ripened, and free; she feels herself as the ipseity, with its immeasurable depth, luminous vastness, and blissful intimacy. (See Luminous Night’s Journey, chapter 10, for more discussion of this process of ripening.)

The simplicity may

develop to the station of the invisible sage, the highest station, the sage who appears as a normal simple human being, but whose innerness is the luminous mystery of the absolute.

Part Six Actualization Of Reality

Ascent and Descent The soul feels any sense of movement away from total intimacy with the absolute mystery to be an intolerable loss. However, regardless of her resistance and protest, it finally dawns on her that she cannot stay where she is, and that it is not up to her personal choice. At some point she recognizes that her unfoldment is taking her to a place different than the transcendent absolute ipseity. She might feel the arising of a great sadness, tremendous grief. It may take her a long time before she realizes

there is no loss of the total intimacy with the absolute, that she does not have to actually leave her home to go on to these further stations. As she surrenders to the dynamism of Being, and ceases to hold on to her realization of the absolute ipseity, she recognizes and surrenders her attachment to the absolute realization. In this process she discovers that while it is true that she is on a journey of descent from the heights of transcendence, this journey is not a separation from the absolute. The descent is a descent into limitation, but it is the descent not of her individual sense of herself, but the descent of the ipseity itself. In other words, she descends into the limitations of the world not as a soul entity, but as the absolute mystery itself.

The journey of descent moves back through the same dimensions of manifestation, from the vantage point of the absolute. In the process of descent, she learns that there is no leaving the absolute, but that the descent is simply the integration into the absolute of all dimensions of manifestation.

The descent is a conscious descent of the absolute into the various dimensions that it has manifested. It is a movement of recognizing the absolute as immanent in all forms and phenomena of reality. The absolute moves from being absolute transcendence, beyond and above all dimensions and forms, to being the inner nature and ground of all. Yet, the absolute does not leave its condition of transcendence; its transcendent mystery simply appears as inseparable and nondual with all forms and dimensions.

In the journey of ascent, the individual soul penetrates the various dimensions of creation and manifestation, which are the garments in which the absolute was hidden. The journey of descent, however, is the conscious donning of these garments by the absolute. The ascent is like a movement inward, while the descent is a movement outward; in the first the absolute regains its conscious awareness, and in the second it retains this awareness within manifestation.

Hence, the descent is into manifestation, but not into exile and alienation. Therefore, just as the journey of ascent is that of shedding and separation leading to the simplicity of singlehood, the journey of descent is that of integration and union leading to the richness of wholeness.

The journey of descent is actually a further understanding and realization of the absolute. It is a matter of understanding the absolute as not only the transcendent truth but also as the immanent ground and essence of all Reality. This includes the view and understanding of all of the dimensions and forms of Reality from the vantage point of the absolute. Hence, this and the next chapter can be viewed as a continuation of the previous chapter’s discussion of the absolute.

Just as the journey of ascent possesses two complementary facets, those of self-realization and individuation, the journey of descent has two facets as well: on the one hand, new dimensions arise, with their associated relative and essential forms, and the self-realization of these dimensions; on the other hand, the soul achieves the personalization of these dimensions and the maturation into greater individuation that integrates these new dimensions and their wisdom.

In the journey of descent, the process of personalization and individuation progresses further, as we understand more fully the functional relationship between self-realization and individuation. This reveals the organic relationship between the triad of self/soul, God/Being, and world/cosmos, leading to the understanding of the wholeness of Reality.

The Hidden Treasure

with compassion, clarity, truth, joy and so on. It is as if the qualities are present in the absolute, in their fullness, but not explicit and not manifest. We learn from this that the absolute is the potential for all qualities of essence, that these qualities actually characterize the absolute but in a completely implicit, undifferentiated, and nonmanifest manner. It is like the essential aspects exist in some kind of a virtual fashion in the absolute. We also find that not only the essential qualities, but all possible forms, are virtual potentialities in the absolute.

In this dimension the absolute is totally transcendent, but now explicitly transcendent to its manifestation. We clearly see this in the way the essential aspects appear. They manifest as they normally do in any of the boundless dimensions of true nature, as faceted diamonds of presence, but a presence characterized by the ontological truth of the particular dimension. In this dimension they are characterized by the truth of the absolute, beyond being and nonbeing. They manifest as delicate, faceted, colored diamonds of presence; the presence, though solid and full, is totally empty. The absolute diamonds are like diamonds of nothing, diamonds of absence. They are solid with sharp facets, yet in our experience of them they feel as if nothing is there. They are so light and empty they have no substance at all, no weight. Yet they are solid and faceted diamond-shaped presence. The experience is completely paradoxical, exactly the same as the experience of the crystal absolute.

The glimmering is just a hint of light, a hint of color that differentiates the compassion aspect from the black vastness of the absolute. With the truth aspect, a gold shimmer differentiates a faceted diamond from the sea of darkness. The truth absolute diamond is all black, a solid nothing, but shimmers and shines at the surface with the metallic gold color of truth. Each essential aspect appears as a transparent colored sheen that differentiates out the particular quality.

Emanation In this dimension we behold all manifest reality as an emanation from the absolute. Everything is a radiance emanating from the still silence of the absolute. Everything emanates from the mystery, for everything is nothing but the variegated and beautiful radiance of the absolute. This is one of the objective relations of the absolute to its creation. Everything is an emanation from the absolute, hence the absolute completely transcends all manifestation. The absolute in this dimension is supremely transcendent to all its manifestations, including its qualities and vehicles.

may think of this relationship as some form of duality, for there is the absolute and there is its radiance. However, it is not exactly duality, nor is it coemergence. The emanation is not separate from or other than the absolute; rather, it is the radiance of the absolute.

The absolute dimension reveals this relation in a completely clear and unmistakable way: the absolute is always pure and transcendent regardless how immanent it is in manifestation. In other words, regardless of how nondual and inseparable is the absolute from manifest reality, it is always itself. It never leaves its mystery, never leaves its ontological status of transcending both being and nonbeing, never leaves its simplicity and emptiness.

Because of this we can express this dimension in the paradoxical statement that “the absolute never changes even though it is in constant transformation.”

Absolute Source Another significant relationship that becomes clear in this dimension is that the absolute is the source of all aspects, qualities, and forms. It is the single source from which all emanates. We understand the absolute here not only as the ultimate source, but as the only source. It is simply The Source. All else is emanation. This perception is not only a metaphysical insight; it goes to the very heart of liberation.

We normally believe that we need love, compassion, intelligence, strength, and so on. In this dimension our view is corrected by seeing it is folly to seek them; for they all come from us, from our presence and identity. As the absolute, we are not only the source of essential qualities, we are actually the source of the situations from which we want the qualities. We are the source of the relationships and activities and life situations that we perceive to possess such qualities. We are, in fact, the source of all creation, all manifest forms and phenomena. We are the source of all; we are the transcendent sun from which everything originates. Recognizing oneself as the source of all can be a very lonely realization. One is the transcendent source of everything, single and alone. However, this is only a reaction based on incomplete understanding of this dimension; for the absolute is not only singularity, but also the very essence of intimacy. It is the source that unifies all of manifestation, just as the center of a wheel unifies all of its spokes. In other words, the question of aloneness returns to her because of her recognition of the singularity of the absolute, that there is only I, as the single source.

Absolute…

To see oneself as the emanating source of all manifestation can lead us to recognize that we are also the subject of all perception. This insight is the specific experience of the self-realization of the absolute dimension. We are the emanating source, and from this…

The self-realization of the absolute dimension is not simply the experience of emanation and the simultaneous witnessing of emanation, but also the recognition that one is the absolute that witnesses the manifestation. We are the subject, and all emanated manifest reality is the object of our perception. The sense of subject is the recognition that the absolute is none other than I. Here the absolute is Self, the…

We experience ourselves not as “I am,” but more like “I” or “II.” But it is not a feeling of identity; it is merely being the mystery, complete abiding as the absolute, and recognizing oneself as such. We learn with certainty that we are always, have always been, and will always be the absolute. We cannot but be the absolute, for only the absolute is. When we are awake to our nature we recognize it as the stupendous silence at the heart of everything, the single source of all manifestation. When we are not awake to our nature we are simply forgetting our nature, and identifying with one of our…

We also realize that “everything is mine, all appearance is a manifestation of me, an extension of my existence. I am the heart of everything, the inmost essence of all. All essential aspects and dimensions express my mystery. Each is a specific manifestation of an implicit perfection, manifesting through differentiation. Each is a pure messenger from me to the soul, reminding her that I am her home and nature and self. All aspects and dimensions point to me, their inmost essence.” There is certainty in this, but this certainty is not mental conviction. It is the direct recognition of one’s nature and self. The soul recognizes that every time she uses the pronoun “I” she is referring to the absolute as subject, for she realizes with certainty…

form, not a center, but the source of all. There is total unification. I am the singleness in the various experiences and manifestations. There is no ego, essence, soul, aspects, various ego sectors, and so on. It is always I manifesting in one form or another. It is not an integration, not a synthesis,…

Preparation for…

The self-realization of this dimension can lead to the arising of other dimensions of descent; for this realization is the beginning of the journey of descent, the process of realizing manifestation and one’s relation to manifestation. The descent is a movement toward greater and more complete immanence, experienced as…

The integration of essential identity gives the soul the capacity for the experience of self-realization, the ability to be and recognize herself as the presence of true nature itself. The point diamond is the clear and precise recognition and understanding of oneself as the essential presence. It is conscious and discriminated self-realization, being essential presence inseparable from knowing it as one’s nature. The wisdom of this diamond vehicle is the recognition and appreciation of one’s uniqueness, and unique realization. But this manifests specifically as the recognition and appreciation of where one is. In other words, to authentically be oneself is to abide in what the logos’s dynamism of Being happens to be manifesting as one’s identity at the moment. This is because Being is always and constantly manifesting all of appearance, including the form and presence of the soul. Therefore, one’s authentic and real truth at each moment is what the logos manifests it as. Therefore, to be true to the dynamic intelligence of the logos the soul only needs to recognize this manifestation and abide in it. The soul does not need to do anything to get anywhere; she does not need to direct her experience toward any particular end, whether it is the absolute or whatever. She cannot determine her own manifestation because it is the logos’s dynamism that actually determines any experience and form.

Wisdom of Nonarrival From this follows the wisdom of open and open-ended inquiry, of the freedom from searching for any particular state or realization. It is the wisdom of knowing that because the dynamic intelligence of true nature, expressed through its creative logos, is what is always manifesting all forms and experience, the best approach to Reality is to recognize what form or dimension is manifesting in the consciousness of the soul, and to abide there. Any attempt to determine one’s experience, by the exercise of any practice, will be a manipulation and an interference in the flow of Reality, or at best a second-guessing of where the logos is taking our experience. Hence, the center of this wisdom is that of holding no end state to strive toward, but knowing that the ideal of liberation is the freedom of the unfoldment, of the surrender to the flow of the logos. Since we are then not trying to direct our experience to go toward any particular state or condition, the dynamism of the logos is liberated to unfold according to its optimizing intelligence. The flow of our experience can be constrained by ego structures and identity, which is the normal constant constraint of the egoic life, or through conscious and intentional inner and spiritual practices that aim toward the generation and actualization of particular states. Both constrain our experience and are counter to the spontaneous outflow of the logos.

This is true even if our spiritual practice is an attempt to realize the highest spiritual states, like that of the absolute or of nonconceptual awareness. What is left for us is the motiveless inquiry into the truth that the logos is manifesting, and the surrender to its flow. (See chapter 22, note 3.) However, this practice of surrendering to and abiding in the true manifestation of the logos does not feel to the soul like an attempt to cooperate with the logos in order for the latter to take her to the condition of an ultimate state of enlightenment. This would simply be a manipulation, not a…

We simply feel authentic, while the form of authenticity can be any form or dimension of the presence of true nature. The wisdom of the point diamond is not only a matter of finding where one is and abiding in it, but of continuing to be where one is. In other words, it is the wisdom of abiding in the flow of one’s experience. It is first the recognition of the thread of one’s unfoldment, as the thread of where one is. This is the clear discriminated experience and understanding of the flow of one’s experience. And it happens that when we do not manipulate our experience, consciously or unconsciously, it simply unfolds and reveals the mysteries of our Being. Since the optimizing intelligence is free to unfold the form of the experience of the soul, it reveals her nature in its various aspects and dimensions, all the way to the absolute, and further into the journey of descent. So the surrender to where we are quickly unfolds our experience into a continuity of being, which becomes a continuing self-revelation of true nature. The important realization and wisdom in this diamond vehicle, which makes it quite helpful as a preparation for the journey of descent, is that we learn not to be attached to any particular state or condition, not even that of the absolute. We learn to flow with whatever the logos of our true nature manifests in our experience, and learn to respect and appreciate any arising state without a preference, comparative judgment, or view of an end state of realization. We become free from our conceptualizing mind and the ideals it uses to constrain and channel the flow of our…

The Core…

There is now freedom from the fixation of self, for at this juncture identity is essential presence that can flow as any quality or dimension. Identity has been shifting for the soul, from ego identity based on historical impressions, to essential identity in any of the essential aspects, to…

nonconceptual awareness, and finally the absolute. Through the self-realization of the absolute dimension identity becomes established as the absolute, for identity has no more place for it to unfold. Before this juncture the identity of the soul, her sense of self-recognition, has been in continual unfoldment, going deeper and subtler. Self-realization in the journey of ascent goes through stages as the dimension of what and who the soul is unfolds to…

These diamonds are similar to those of the point diamonds, except that the center has changed from the radiant point of light to the dark emptiness of the absolute. This change reflects the fact that one’s identity has shifted from essential identity to the absolute ipseity. With the essential identity, one’s center and core can be essence in its various aspects, while the identity of the absolute ipseity is the only unchanging truth in Reality. In other words, one is now free from the unfoldment of identity, for such unfoldment has reached its ultimate repose. The point diamond liberates the unfoldment from the fixation of the self; realization of the core dimension integrates it with the absolute as the unchanging core.

The central issue for the point diamond is the need to free one’s unfoldment from influence. The central issue for the core dimension is identification, forgetting one’s true self, one’s inmost nature. In other words, it is identification with the soul, with the unfoldment. The resolution is seeing that it is the absolute that identifies, that forgets, and its deepest identification is with the unfolding soul. The core dimension reveals to us that we are the absolute, and that the soul is one of our expressions, an organ for our experience.

The experiential sense of a core diamond is of a substantial and living presence of essential qualities, but the depth and core of oneself always feels empty and dark, silent and still, mysterious and unfathomable. The primary wisdom inherent in these diamonds is that the absolute is the core nature of all essential aspects, and of all manifest forms.

Just as the universe continues to unfold, so does one’s individual soul; yet one’s core and identity remains constant as the mysterious absolute. The absolute is clearly the inner nature, the depth and core of all manifestation. Being the inner nature and core of all manifest forms is the objective relation this dimension reveals the absolute to have with manifest reality.

The Ground Dimension

The next step in integration appears in what we term the ground dimension, where each aspect arises as a faceted diamond of a particular color and quality, which possesses two layers, inner and outer; the inner is the absolute and the outer is nonconceptual awareness. The inner layer is not a spherical darkness but a diamond-shaped black emptiness, of the same shape as the external layer. It is like two concentric diamonds, the inner is constituted from the medium of the absolute and the outer from the medium of nonconceptual presence.

The experience of an essential aspect on this dimension is that of being a nonconceptual presence—clear, precise, and objective. There is no conceptualization, no ideas of oneself, just simply being, where being is inseparable from awareness. Yet one experiences one’s nonconceptual presence as grounded in something deeper, vaster, and more mysterious. We experience manifest reality again as a oneness of Being, but it is a nonconceptual oneness, where it is the absence of conceptual partitions, instead of the sense of oneness. At the same time, we are nonconceptually aware of a dark and mysterious ground that underlies this nonconceptual unity of appearance.

This system of energetic centers uses the vital energy—prana or shakti—for its functioning, an energy that the organism partly acquires through the breath. It is this energy that yogic systems utilizing kundalini for their practices try to cultivate and direct. Kundalini is the name given to a reservoir of dormant energy, visualized as a serpent coiled in the first chakra at the perineum. By awakening the kundalini, the shakti is activated, which then rises up the spine activating and energizing the chakra centers. The chakra centers become doorways to deeper spiritual experiences and dimensions.

We have used the concept of Being in two primary ways. The first is that of existence, of the ontological dimension of all forms. In this meaning Being is the same as presence, for it is the beingness of the forms.

How can one pursue personal excellence in a human community and still fully engage in the inner quest for liberation and spiritual realization? How can one have a job, family, friends, interests, creative activities, and so on, and experience them as mutually supportive with one’s inner quest for meaning and liberation? How can one pursue personal excellence and the inner quest but find this not only nonconflictual with but supportive of others’ well-being?