This inherent discriminating knowingness of true nature encompasses the content of all that exists, all that can possibly exist, and all that has ever existed. While it transcends the experience of the human soul, it nevertheless appears within our individual consciousness in a specific essential form. More precisely, this knowingness, which is itself the knowledge of everything, manifests in the soul as the specific capacity of discrimination. In other words, the Divine Mind can manifest in the soul in miniature form—a microcosm of that macrocosm. We call this microcosm the Diamond Guidance.

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.

The imagination of the universal mind. It is not your own imagination. You are being imagined all the time, so is the chair and everything else, just like being a figure in a dream, and the figure in the dream believes he or she is real. Imagine you have a dream where you see people and one of those people believes that they are really real while they are being dreamed by you. Your situation is exactly like that. Exactly. This is what is referred to as the universal mind, or the Divine Mind.

The knowingness inherent in presence, referred to earlier as the Divine Mind, was called by the Greeks nous, or higher intellect. When the Greeks, as in the case of Plotinus, used the word “intellect,” they did not mean discursive thinking. In fact, in Western languages, the word “intellect” originally meant “the inherent knowingness.” However, this changed mostly in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, when “intellect” began to refer to the representational knowing that goes on in our mind. Now “intellect” is applied only to mental knowingness, the egoic reflection of true knowingness. The inherent knowingness, or nous, was called the logos by some Christians, total intellect by the Sufis, and discriminating awareness by the Buddhists. Now, this discriminating awareness or knowingness is the source of all experience—the various impressions, forms, and colors. Whether they are ordinary physical experiences or unusual spiritual experiences, they are all the same to the inherent knowingness—they are all knowingness, at different levels and intensities of brilliance. The ego experience is just dull knowingness, while the essential experience is a bright knowingness, a luminous presence.

So the field that is reality is not only a presence that is awareness, but an awareness that is knowingness. Now, this discriminating awareness recognizes the whole as a field that has within it patterns that can be of color, form, shape, texture, smell, sound, or all these. These are the universal patterns. The inherent knowing of this whole field, with all its patterns, is sometimes referred to as the Divine Mind, or the mind of God. In other words, the knowing of all that exists is nothing but God’s mind. So if you take Being as the presence of God, then what we are saying is that the inherent knowingness is God’s mind. In that sense, because we discriminate ourselves from the whole field, we are all living in God’s mind; we are creations of God’s mind, contents of God’s mind. In fact, we are nothing but God’s ideas, because from the perspective of the presence of Being, all these forms are discriminations or concepts, and in some sense, words. Each form is a distinct vibration, with its own sound, but because each sound is known—inherently knowledge—it is also a word.

When I say “higher intellect” or “divine mind,” many people misunderstand and consider these to be mental faculties. But the heart is vital to this kind of creative discrimination. The functioning of this capacity actually happens through the unity of mind and heart because without love, there would be no compassion or sensitivity to the mind’s discernment. The creative discrimination of presence is activated by the participation of the heart. This discrimination arises according to true, deep, existential need and only when we have the right orientation—a loving desire to know the truth. As I said before, this capacity of presence to discriminate experience transforms life into a process of discovery and revelation. This presence is not our mind, is not our feelings, is not our body, although it makes use of all of these; it is its own truth. It is an intelligence that brings not only discernment and understanding but also creative discrimination. What makes the discrimination creative is that the moment we make a discrimination, we are seeing an implication, which reveals another possibility of experience that opens another insight, another experience, or another whole dimension of knowing and being.