This simple stillness full of graceful clarity, in its depth and silence, is gently and effortlessly manifesting everything, appearing everything in a process of effulgence and light. The enlightened view includes the process of manifestation, includes this constant effulgence that creates all the things in the world from the void, that materializes each thing from nothing. In that sense reality is a wizard. Out of complete nothingness appears all that we perceive and experience. And it’s as simple and as easy as you dreaming something. When you dream you create a whole universe that feels like solid matter; people get hurt and various things happen, but it’s really not taking you any effort. You are completely asleep, completely resting and it is all happening. It is the same with Quintessence; it is completely still and silent and at the same time is unfolding everything with effortless ease and spontaneity.

Practice and realization are one dynamism manifesting in different ways. One is manifesting as the action of the soul, and the other is manifesting as the arising of true nature. It is one indivisible process. Neither one causes the other. The more I recognized that, the more I had a deeper understanding of how practice is realization and how realization is practice. So we are seeing that there is a force, there is a power, there is a dynamism that manifests. Looking at it from the perspective of individual soul, this dynamism manifests as the interest, the longing, the yearning, the orientation, and the practice. Looking at it from the perspective of reality, this dynamism manifests as Being unfolding spontaneously as grace. They are both part of one process, two complementary expressions of one force, whose intensifying feedback loop culminates in conscious insight or realization. This unitary process appears in the locus of the soul as individual practice and in the locus beyond the soul as the spontaneous functioning of Being.

Everyone says, “God knows.” But God doesn’t have a memory or make plans the way human beings do. God is spontaneous creativity. So there is no purpose, in a sense; reality’s intelligence arises and just manifests itself more and more and more, in a very experimental way. Take the arising of life on Earth: If you study evolution, you will see that it’s very experimental. One species arises here, doesn’t get very far—and before you know it, it’s gone. Another species seems to go much further. So it’s all an experiment—which one works better, which one develops more. The human race tends to believe that it’s not just an experiment; we think we’re the purpose of creation. We might kill ourselves and most other life on Earth because we take ourselves so seriously, believing this is true. But we are just part of the play that is always arising and changing. This concept of creation as playfulness manifests in the inquiry as a playful attitude, which brings the same quality into the unfoldment. This playfulness brings in joy and delight, curiosity and celebration. This is the way we participate in the divine joy. Of course, we can make up whatever purposes we like. That’s part of the playfulness: You make up a purpose for a year or two and believe that it’s the purpose of your life. Wonderful! Two years later, you change it to another one—why not? In fact, people do that all the time, don’t they? You don’t feel bad that for the first twenty-one years of your life, you had a purpose that you don’t have now. You don’t say, “I wasted my life.” No, you say, “Now I have another purpose.” Who knows what will happen next year?

When I say that Living Being is practicing, I basically mean that Living Being is living its life and manifesting its possibilities, which is perceived as authentic living or the interest in realness and truth. And we have seen how the interest in realness and truth is already caused by the realization, caused by the arising of true nature. We can further see, by going beyond the notion of causality, that the interest in reality is not exactly caused by the arising of true nature but is itself the Living Being manifesting interest and practice. In other words, the one who attains realization is the Living Being. The self does not attain realization. The self is not the one that achieves enlightenment. The Living Being manifests the condition that we call enlightenment as it perfects its practice. When we are not engaging the enlightenment drive, it means we are practicing for all kinds of selfish external reasons and that is not yet true practice. Every time we truly practice, every time the practice is expressing the enlightenment drive, it is the Living Being practicing. That is true practice. And it is possible then to realize that when you are sitting to practice or are engaged in a movement practice, it is Being itself manifesting as practice. Beyond the individual self, this mystery of Being is perfecting its capacities and developing its maturity and manifesting its secrets as discoveries, revelations, and realizations.

Manifestation turns out to be nothing but the differentiation of pure presence. Pure presence, a homogeneous manifold field, structures this manifold by differentiating it into the various forms of manifestation. Manifestation is not something that comes out of true nature; rather it is true nature that spontaneously structures itself into the myriad forms constituting manifestation. Thus it is said that manifestation is coemergent with true nature, a state referred to traditionally as nondual reality. It is nondual not because it is two making up a unity; rather it is primordially one, one field with inherent patterns that we recognize as the forms of manifestation.

To be completely poor is to recognize our true condition as individuals, which is that nothing we have or experience or accomplish is actually ours. It all belongs to the ultimate spiritual truth, the absolute ground of reality. We then experience a phenomenological emptiness, a voidness of all qualities, of everything, including being and existence. When this condition prevails, it becomes possible for the source of all manifestation to reveal itself in this voidness. This is a subtle point. When we recognize our inherent poverty, our sense of self is completely denuded, which makes it possible for the essence of divinity to manifest.

And there is another nonhierarchical realization that does not have to do with duality or nonduality but with the relationship of phenomena with each other, the relationship of one form to another. This realization reveals one of the secrets of true nature: that it is beyond time and space. This does not refer to the experience of timelessness and spacelessness, because timelessness is the polar opposite of time and spacelessness is the polar opposite of space. Rather, one of the understandings that this realization brings in is that each manifestation of true nature is all of true nature, each form of true nature is true nature in its entirety. This realization that each quality, each form of true nature, has in it all of true nature turns out to be a characteristic of reality as a whole. This means that your body, because its nature is true nature, which is truly beyond time and space, contains all bodies and contains the totality of the universe. Don’t worry, you won’t feel overcrowded, because this realization usually occurs by understanding the spaciousness of true nature. That spaciousness is simply a reflection of the mystery of beyond-space. This realization is also nonhierarchical in the sense that it has nothing to do with primordial or not primordial, with ultimate or not ultimate. It is a different way of looking at realization.

In other words, manifestation is the appearance of forms that the dimension of pure presence assumes, due to the flow of the logos. Yet manifestation is never separate from the absolute, for it is its radiance. Therefore, manifestation always has a ground composed of both pure presence and absolute, being and nonbeing.

And since in actuality there is always manifestation, there are always presence and emptiness. We can say only that emptiness does not exist on its own; for it is always the emptiness of manifest forms, always associated with manifestation. There is no such thing as emptiness on its own, nonbeing on its own, without being. In other words, presence and emptiness together are in actuality the ultimate ground. And experiences of dissolution of presence in emptiness until there is total annihilation can only be an individual experience, for the world continues during one's annihilation. Therefore, we call the synthesis of presence and emptiness the quintessence, the deepest core and nature of everything. This does not contradict the truth that emptiness is the ultimate essence because it is the inner aspect of the quintessence. It only points to the fact that the underlying ground and nature of manifestation is always presence coemergent with emptiness.

More precisely, the absolute has no relation to manifestation, for the possibility of relation does not arise unless there is differentiation. It is a matter of complete unity, absolute nonduality.

We can have endless, amazing understanding in this absolute Essence of Being; we can describe some of its qualities; but we never feel we have described it because it is inexhaustible. It is the source of all qualities, all possibilities, and all potential; but when we experience it directly we find absolutely nothing. It is a delightful nothing that dazzles and releases. In other words it is the unmanifest source of all manifestation. From this source, everything appears as itself, originating from this unfathomable emptiness, but nothing becomes anything.