Much confusion in spiritual work and philosophy rests on the fact that people take one dimension or another to be the final or total truth. Having some capacity to perceive from the nonconceptual level brings a lot of clarity to our understanding of the various dimensions and their relationships. So the nonconceptual is like one big block with nothing differentiable in it. Then this becomes carved. And this carving is what we see as Universal Mind. Remember, it is not a mind like the personal mind. We cannot understand Universal Mind until we differentiate between personal mind and Universal Mind. And in Universal Mind all manifest existence appears as concepts.

There’s no way not to be confused if you start with the word I. That’s the initial confusion. If you start with confusion, how is it possible not to be confused? We got into this by talking about effort: how effortlessness is spontaneity and spontaneity means no reflection on yourself. The moment you reflect on yourself, there is no spontaneity. There is recognition, and then there is deliberation—thinking about what you are doing. The interesting thing is that most of the time we are actually like that, but not when we are thinking about ourselves. When you are reflecting on yourself, you are not being spontaneous.

Bringing understanding to bear on our realization can relieve us of a great deal of suffering, confusion, and trouble as well as relieve other people of us—because much of what passes for help is actually self-serving. That doesn’t mean there isn’t good help. There is a lot of good help and truly motivated help. The more exactly we see reality as it is, the more objective the helping becomes—more to the point and more serving the illumination and maturation of any particular organ. That is why some people say that doing the work of realization is helping God evolve creation. This is another approximation that attempts to get at the dynamic between our role and the role of reality.

Understanding soul and essence, and the relation between them, clarifies such confusion. Soul grows and develops. She does this by actualizing her potential. The central potential she needs to actualize is her essence. 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, for it is the ground of all potential, the ultimate nature. Realizing essence we recognize we are primordially and fundamentally immaculate and complete. The soul develops, and her spiritual development is the actualization and realization of essence. But in the state of self-realization, development does not make sense, for we are then essence, which is perfection and completeness itself.