To the extent that we live from the perspective of trying to find fulfillment, or from trying to get better, we live in an empty world. However, if we just rest, forget all searching and give up the seeking, the world becomes beautiful and full. When you are seeking, you separate your consciousness, your soul, from your Being, from your source, so that your whole perception then is perception devoid of Being.

You never get filled because it's not true that you're an empty stomach. How can you fill an image? You can spend eternity piling in grace and love. You might feel full momentarily, but the next day you crave something else. After awhile, you might be disturbed by this cycle, "I'm dependent on my teacher. I'm dependent on the school. I should be independent. I should be autonomous." These are the intimations that you are beginning to see the Basic Fault. But if you take independence to mean that you're a discrete entity that is going to go somewhere else for fulfillment, you will simply resume the meal at a different table.

If you want to live a more fulfilling life, you have to develop a taste for certain values, a taste for truth and understanding, depth and profundity, precision and exquisiteness, dignity and integrity. These refined values are subtle rather than gross. They will lead to a refined human life. All of these things are present all the time – you don’t have to achieve them, you just need to appreciate them. You need to begin to love them and orient yourself towards them so that you allow yourself the time and opportunity for them to emerge.

We only feel fulfillment if we are genuine, if we deal with things in a genuine way, if we don't run away from our difficulties. And even with pleasures and successes, we tend to like ourselves more when we deal with them in a mature rather than in an indulgent way. Forget about superego judgment and what other people think. We’re talking about you in your own heart, your own inherent sense of value, how you feel about yourself and your life. The morality of the superego developed from this core, from the way that human beings actually work. The sense of gaining value through right conduct has a true origin. If we are who we are and do what we are capable of doing, we tend to like ourselves, appreciate ourselves, and respect ourselves.

So the function of the soul in life is not simply to maximize our pleasure, but to realize our more objective function as an organ of truth, as an organ of realization, as an organ of a much larger being, of a much bigger, universal reality. We come to realize that our happiness, our joy, our fulfillment arise from actually serving the truth. We serve the truth by being as pure an expression of it as possible. God or the truth doesn’t need you to do things for it, to walk around talking about it or buying it things, but actually to express it, to bring the truth to life. We serve the truth by manifesting it, because what the truth wants is to move from an unmanifest form to a manifest form. That’s why the Sufis say that God needs man in order to express Himself in the world. God manifests in the world through the purified ones. So our job is to be a servant. And to serve is to express. And to express is to be a clear and unimpeded medium for the truth. For that to happen, we need to be purified of our coarser elements. If we approach experience as if it were a lollipop, the objective function of the soul is not fulfilled. The more our soul is aware of the deeper realms and the more correct its attitude toward those realms, the more we express the truth. The deeper realm, the realm of objective reality, is ultimately the home of the soul—its origin, source, and nature. The absolute reality is the nature and origin not only of the soul but of everything. What better master to serve than the innermost nature of you and of everything! So being a servant is an exalted position.

Thus the soul has a much deeper loyalty to her initial object of gratification than most of us suspect. The power of this attachment does not become clear until it is brought up in deep levels of the soul’s inner journey. In our work this issue arises in connection with the experience and integration of the diamond vehicle called the Markabah, the diamond vehicle having to do with pleasure. 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’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.

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 scientifically, if she does not realize her essential nature her experience continues to be characterized by emptiness and strife, on the same level as most human beings. This is why the wisdom traditions think of their work as the most significant for humanity, as transcending any artistic, scientific, cultural, or intellectual kind of education and development. The essence of the soul stands apart from the rest of all of her potential, for it is the only possibility she has for finding true liberation and fulfillment.

Spiritual transformation is about finally becoming convinced that the real treasures lie within us—that our consciousness, our soul, contains all the wonderful things that we want to experience. We only need to be open to our Being and invite it to display itself. This means that our true nature—with all its beauty and all the experiences of it that human beings crave—is not something that we need to create or accomplish. We don’t have to work hard at getting these beautiful experiences; they are already there. We just need to be relaxed about it. We need to be loose inside ourselves. Then our true nature will begin to flow out, to bubble up, and we discover that everything we were seeking so hard for outside is all there inside us. That is a very difficult lesson for human beings to learn because all of society and much of our experience tells us it is the other way around: When you have more money, things get better. When more people love you, you are happier. When the weather is nicer, you can enjoy yourself more. We believe that it is always something external that makes things better. But the fact that feelings of happiness, joy, confidence, strength, power, peacefulness, fulfillment, clarity, and freedom are potentialities of our soul means that we don’t have to worry too much. It is as Meher Baba used to say: “Don’t worry, be happy.” That was one of his spiritual instructions. If you really don’t worry, everything you’re after is already there. We already are that true nature. We already have all the treasures within us.

This world we live in, the world of appearance and everything that is in it, has nothing wrong with it. In a sense, it is neutral in that things are neither good nor bad. What makes it a place of suffering is that we are not present in it; what makes it a place of fulfillment is that we are present in it. For fulfillment is nothing but the fullness of our presence. The world is like a magic show – you manifest whatever you have inside you. If you have suffering, you will manifest suffering, and if you have happiness, you will manifest that happiness and the world will be a happy place for you. If you have fear and hatred, you will manifest these beings. The world is like a dream life; it is as simple as that. Your dream life is very dependent on your mind; it is not God who determines your dream life. No one else is coercing you to dream one way or another. Your dreams are an expression of who you are; there is a whole universe going on in your dreams.