There is a place in us that loves to know the truth, that wants, values, and appreciates the truth. Only inquiry inspired by this love can serve the functions of activation and transformation. If we inquire out of love to know the truth, our inquiry will naturally disclose the truth that we love to know. We all need to inquire into our own hearts to see if there is a place in us that really loves to know the truth, where we love it enough to do whatever we can to inquire, to investigate. This loving to know the truth is nothing but the response of our Being to its own dynamism. The dynamism is revealing something new, and it manifests initially as the Soul’s interest in discovering the truth for its own sake.

No matter how you feel about it, at some point you must face the fact that the process of inquiry, of investigation, of understanding your experience, is a heart involvement. It is an affair of the heart that represents the spiritual dimension of your life. It is the lifeline of the soul. This means that regardless of what is happening in your life, there can be a thread of luminosity, sweetness, and intimacy running through it. You can love what is true and life can be a love affair that goes on regardless of what is happening

One particular identification is especially challenged by the love of the truth: our identification with being small, deficient, inadequate, incapable, and not up to the task. This belief in our deficiency can prevent us from opening to the love of truth because this love will expand us in a way that we are afraid we won’t know how to handle. It seems much easier to stay with the status quo and its cozy familiarity. If we allow the love of truth to become powerful, we will be confronted with this identification with inadequacy. The love of truth is a subtle and refined quality in our consciousness. It tends to be hidden behind many veils of emotion, instinct and identification. It may not be easy for you to contact this deep movement of the heart. Yet without the experience of loving truth for its own sake, regardless of the consequences – without the willingness to completely open your heart to the fullness of your own truth – you will not have the energy or the motivation to go beyond your familiar reality.

Truth is such that when you love it, it will tend to own your love. In other words, when you love truth for its own sake and allow that love to deepen and develop, you begin to see that loving anything else takes away from love for the truth. When you love something else besides the truth, there will come a time in the journey of inquiry when you are going to be faced with a choice. More precisely, the more you experience the love for truth, the more you will recognize that this love must become the dominant overwhelming love in your life. It can’t be just one of the loves.

If we inquire into the energy of the optimizing force, we find that it is love. Love is a creative energy that disposes the dynamism to move in an optimizing way. This makes love the fuel of inquiry – and points to a very clear relationship between love and the revelation of truth: when we love the truth for its own sake, we truly love. When our love is selfless and genuine, it is the love of what is real. This shows more specifically why it is the energy for the optimizing, energizing, evolutionary force. Love, by its very nature, is a matter of revelation, of unfoldment. It is a manifestation of Being whose very nature is a matter of opening up and unfolding, like the unfolding of a rose.

As you see, we need to investigate even our love of truth. We need to apply the love of truth to our love of truth and find out what it means to us. We need to find out what love is and what truth is. In the beginning you probably do not know what truth or love is. Who said love and truth are good? You need to find out for yourself. Truth is one of the elements of reality that, like a thread, goes all the way through all of the levels of reality because truth is what is actuality, what is present. If you really want to find out the truth, you can find out everything. So truth becomes the guide. Truth becomes a light that can guide you everywhere. I say loving the truth instead of seeking it, because if you are seeking truth you might seek to avoid feeling pain. You might seek truth for another purpose, which will then make you not see the truth. But if you really love truth, then you will automatically want to see all of it, not for any particular reason but because you like seeing the truth. So loving the truth is not exactly seeking the truth, even though it might include seeking the truth sometimes. Loving the truth is the attitude of the heart. The heart falls in love. It falls in love with the truth, with an aspect of reality. The heart falling in love with the truth is one of the most important realizations, the most important change, that can happen in a human being. The heart really turning toward the truth is the most far-reaching realization because if you really love the truth, you’ll realize everything.

If you love truth for its own sake, the truth will free you. But if you hope the truth will free you, you cannot be free. You must love the truth for its own sake, without hope. Then there is no question of freedom/no freedom, no question of Essence/no Essence, no question of enlightenment/no enlightenment. It's just love of truth, and that's it. Nothing else is there. Anything else will bring discord. Accepting what is, understanding what is there, loving the truth that is happening at every second is the natural state, the state without personality, the state of no mind, is the state of no division.

We can also say that loving truth for its own sake in the process of inquiry and understanding is the way that the heart and mind are united, becoming one – which is the revelation. This is the way to quicken the soul. In inquiry there is interest, excitement, and initiative. It’s as though a light in the heart had been turned on. Thus, the opening of the heart has to do with quickening of the soul.

So we’re not courageous to earn the approval of the superego—our own or anybody else’s. That won’t affect our real sense of value. We’re courageous because we know the value of knowing and living according to the truth. Acting courageously often is scary and painful. But by allowing that fear, that pain, something happens in us. There is a transformation that makes us feel satisfied, even though we might have had a difficult time. As you can see, this satisfaction is personal. It’s not something between you and other people; it’s between you and you. Between you and your own integrity. Between you and your own sense of truth. Loving the truth for its own sake means preferring to be sincere with yourself, preferring to be honest with yourself. Loving the truth means not lying to yourself, not being hypocritical. It means having the courage to penetrate your experience. It means having the courage to see your deficiencies and fears, your lies and delusions. The love of truth for its own sake can be expressed even with mundane issues. Every minute, we interact. Every minute, we conduct ourselves in some way. And we can notice whether the love of truth is present in these moments. Now, it’s also true that we are ignorant. We often don’t know what’s happening or what’s driving us or how to find out the truth. The teaching provides the means for paying attention and seeing what’s real. But we’re the ones who need to do it. We’re the ones who need to practice, to grapple with our life.

The love of truth, which the soul has learned in the course of her inner journey and through which she has invited the assistance of the diamond guidance, comes up against this basic human orientation. The soul recognizes that to continue to love truth selflessly requires a huge shift in her view of life and her orientation in living it. She sees that truth must come before pleasure, and that she must look inward for what she needs. Most human beings are not willing to make this shift, and are not even convinced of its truth or necessity. The conventionally conditioned soul is not 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.

At some point, we recognize the libidinal soul as one of the main barriers to the love of truth. Love of truth is a subtle thing; it is the illumination, the radiance, and the melting sweetness of the heart. The animal soul, however, doesn’t love the truth. Not only that, it doesn’t even recognize love. This soul is dominated by cravings, by animal desires... We need to deal with this level of our soul if we are to liberate our heart, for our heart can truly love only when it is free. The heart exists at the level of the human soul rather than at the level of the animal soul. And unless the instinctual drives in the animal soul are confronted, they will confine – and ultimately control – the human soul and heart.

The love for truth, which reverses the attitude of defense, leads directly to the truth of experience, the truth that was defended against. And, as we already know, it is this truth that is the nutrient for the development of the Personal Essence. This indicates that when the heart loves truth it is approaching the specific nutrition needed for the essential person. So we can say, although it is only a conceptualization, that the heart loves the Personal Essence and its development.

As we look into the nature of how love functions on the different paths to realization, we see that in the more devotional types of spiritual practice, at some point the heart explicitly becomes an ecstatic expression of the union with God, or the Beloved. This ecstasy becomes erotic at times, as in the case of some Christian and Hindu mystics. The spiritual paths of mind and knowledge do not tend to bring in this type of erotic and juicy feel; knowledge and its precision open our experience to new realms, but the love is implicit more than explicit. Similarly, when love is present in a devotional and respectful form, it rarely expresses itself as erotic love. In the way we usually work, we use the mind’s discriminating capacity, the heart’s loving nature, and the body’s precious vehicle of life to go beyond all of these without leaving any of them behind. We do not emphasize one over the other, nor does deeper refinement through our work mean that we transcend these centers of our being; we simply see the natural potential hidden within them all. In the course of our spiritual maturation, each becomes more capable and more fully realized, not less. Thus we use the mind to go beyond the mind’s limitations; we use the capacity of discrimination to reveal subtler levels of mind. But here, the heart’s innate love for beauty and truth is a guiding principle: The marriage of heart and mind is a must on this spiritual journey, for it is the segmentation of our experience that keeps them limited and restricted to conventional reality. The love of truth allows the mind to open to new possibilities that mental logic alone cannot reveal or consider entering. And the heart can be clarified of its historical and emotional content through the mind’s clarity and precision, making available the energy liberated from the trapped structures of our personal history, so it can nurture and enliven our evolving spiritual development. This is the hidden tantra within the work of this path.