The soul desires the presence of Brilliancy because the soul needs it in order to feel safe to come out and meet the world, to learn to have a life of her own. The soul has an innate need to see the aspect of Brilliancy, which is a part of herself, because as you know, the soul learns first by seeing things outside herself. As children, we don’t know that we have Essence, with all its aspects and qualities. A young child cannot express and embody the functions of the essential aspects. She needs them to be expressed, to be shown, by the human beings who take care of her. She first sees them in her parents, who, as they embody and express these qualities and functions, become mirrors for her own innate qualities. Then, by identification with her parents, she can manifest those qualities and become more that way. Thus, there is an intrinsic need for modeling of what the child can be by both father and mother. In other words, the child’s need for the presence and functioning of the father is actually the need for a part of her essential self—the aspect of Brilliancy and its qualities and capacities. However, as a child, you don’t see this as the need for yourself; you experience it as the need for your father. People often talk about their father not being there for them in childhood, or say that the father who was there wasn’t the father they wanted. The more deeply you explore what kind of father you wanted, the more you start to describe the qualities of Brilliancy. And the more you know what qualities you needed in your father, the more you recognize the qualities of Brilliancy.

The father is important to the child as a person separate and different from mother. His presence aids the child’s differentiation and separation from mother. Most children experience the availability of the father as a support for them to differentiate and separate from the mother in early childhood ……….. So the father becomes important for support of individuation, for guidance in the world outside that of mother, for protection, and for identification. This makes him the focus of the projection of a group of essential aspects. These aspects, we have observed, are always associated with father or with the relationship to him. Students consistently report these aspects to be associated with masculinity or maleness. They are very different, in terms of experience, from those of the mother group. One might gain an intuitive sense of this difference by learning that the mother group is represented by the color gold, the father group by the color white or silver. The Father aspects include Universal Will, Diamond Guidance, Intelligence, and most of the boundless aspects of Being. These aspects usually do not manifest until later in the process of essential realization.

The third quality associated with the father is Diamond Guidance. We have already discussed this aspect, as Diamond Consciousness, in some detail in a previous chapter. It is the aspect of objective consciousness. Its function is objective perception and understanding, functioning primarily through the integration of analysis and synthesis. It is the guidance for the realization and development of the Personal Essence. So one of its main issues is father’s guidance in one’s process of separation and individuation. This issue can manifest as conflict in one’s relationship to one’s father, that led to doubting his guidance, and thus a lack of trust in him. To regain the trust, one must become objective about one’s father. This ultimately leads to the perception of splitting of father’s image, of seeing him as either all good or all bad. When this splitting is understood and resolved and one becomes objective about the father and his guidance, the true objective guidance is realized. The more one frees one’s capacity to trust guidance and to perceive it, the more one trusts the guidance of the Diamond Consciousness. This aspect, naturally, becomes projected on the teacher, as the guide for the process of inner realization. But this then brings about the father transference, and facilitates its understanding in terms of understanding one’s relationship to father, if the teacher is able to undertake the guidance. This leads to the process of separation from the image of father, which becomes experienced as separation from the teacher, culminating in the integration of the Diamond Consciousness.

When we realize we didn’t have the father we thought we had, we might get pretty gloomy and depressed; it might start seeming to be the end of the world. We forget that what we need is not exactly father but what father represents. You are knowing yourself by recognizing yourself at that age. So, as you recognize that part of yourself, it grows, gets bigger and stronger. To really be the father toward yourself is to protect and guide your inner child. So integrating Brilliancy means, among other things, to be the right kind of father to the child within you. You need to see that you wanted the good father; but this longing reveals a hollowness that gets replaced by the brilliant presence, which you then recognize as exactly what you wanted from your father. In other words, by longing for the good father you are actually longing for Brilliancy. This association between father and Brilliancy is universal. In contacting the longing for father, you find your soul the way it was when its development was arrested. This is what I call the Soul Child. When you integrate the Brilliancy by working through the relationship with your father, you become the needed protective or guiding father for yourself, the father you never had. More accurately, Essence becomes the protecting and guiding father for the soul. As the soul grows and matures, it attains the qualities and capacities of Brilliancy. In this way, the soul becomes whole, integrated, and inseparable from the qualities and capacities of Brilliancy.

A second aspect related to the father is Intelligence. This label does not do justice to this aspect; it is more like the essence of intelligence, or what enables the mind to be brilliant. It is the aspect of pure intelligence, of luminosity, of brilliance. It gives one the sense of completeness, of protection, of being contained and looked after. Its immediate presence feels so fine that it is the smoothest sensation or consciousness that one can experience; it has an effect of imbuing the mind with a uniquely penetrating quality. At the same time there is a sense of largeness, expansion, immensity and majesty. The consistent experience of our students is that when they feel a desire for the father, they ultimately find this aspect. So its relation to father is like the relation of the Merging Essence to mother. Thus the father’s image is the identification system that covers it up, and replaces it. So realizing it means working through one’s relation with one’s own father.

So Brilliancy can change in its form and therefore its influences on all of our capacities, depending on our need in the moment. In the same way a father needs to be a different kind of father at different times, depending on the needs of the child at the moment, or at different stages of development. Your father needs to fulfill different functions at different times and stages. And when those different functions become internalized, you will become the father of yourself. Then your capacities will take on various forms and manifestations according to the needs of the moment. This understanding of the relationship between Brilliancy and father, and how one integrates and embodies the various qualities and capacities as one re-owns one’s own Brilliancy, gives a more adequate understanding of the internalization of parental functions than is available through depth psychology. The view in depth psychology, as in psychoanalytic theory, is that the child develops most of his capacities and functions by internalizing them from the parents, the father in our present case. That view does not recognize the human child’s innate qualities, but gives him only the capacity to learn those qualities from the parents. It is as if the child begins his life possessing no qualities of strength, support, guidance, and responsibility, but develops them only by acquiring them from the father. In the understanding we are working with, we see that the child has all of the qualities and capacities in potential as part of his own Brilliancy. He cannot, however, utilize or express them because of the immaturity of his physical and psychic apparatuses. So he needs to have them reflected in his environment until he is able to fully embody them.

Universal Will creates a sense of immense strength and solidity, a confidence in one’s capacities in relation to others. Hence, it is quite important for personal relationships. When Universal Will is present the feeling is that one’s personal Will is supported by a bigger, more immense and more universal presence. It is quite impossible to appreciate what we mean when we say it is an immense presence, without having the direct experience. It is like feeling one is solid, immense and immovable, like a mountain. There is nothing like it in ego states. Universal Will is usually projected on the father, and becomes associated with his image. The issues around it are basically those of father’s support for one’s own Will. The specific identification system related to it is the identification with father’s masculine strength and solidity. The issue is generally different for women, for whom the identification is with a self-image that is receptive to the father’s support and solidity.

So far in this exploration of the relationship with father we have seen how we identify with him, how much we become like him. But you need to remember that identification is partially a way to defend against the desire and longing for father; it is a way to feel we have father. If we feel that we have father, we don’t need to feel that we want him and thereby avoid acknowledging our longing for him. But having father means having all the qualities of Brilliancy: a sense of being safe, a sense of intelligence and guidance, a sense of capacity, responsibility, and brilliance. We believe we are getting all of these by becoming like father, which is why we often become like father without even knowing it. There is a deep, inner need for those qualities; and because in one way or another we associate them with father, we believe that the only way to have them is to become like our father. But to be able to truly embody these qualities, you need to see what you really want when you identify with your father in that way. Then, by seeing what you really want with this identification, it is possible for you to regain, or re-own, that part of yourself.