If the soul is operating from her own inherent capacities – from true nature – she will not need guidance for her development. Then unfoldment will happen on its own because that is what an optimizing force means. It is a force within our soul that is intelligent, responsive, and aware. It will respond to things accurately, intelligently, and appropriately to develop the soul in the best way that she can develop. And that is what we want when we seek any kind of guidance – internal or external. Inner guidance means the directing of our unfoldment so that the unfoldment will optimize itself all the way to wholeness. Inner guidance guides the soul in her unfoldment so that she will unfold in the right direction, correctly, toward maximizing and optimizing her life and experience.

If we inquire into the energy of the optimizing force, we find that it is love. Love is the 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 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. Rumi once said in a poem, “This is love: to fly heavenward. To rend, every instant, a hundred veils.” To love is to rend the veils. What does it mean to rend the veils? To reveal. So love is Being in the process of revealing its truth. It is the dynamic, revealing energy of Being.

This unfoldment, however, is invisible for a long time because it is so hard to separate our notions of guidance from the early imprint of being led through life by a wise and kindly parent. This deep unconscious association blinds us to the liberating reality of inner guidance. True guidance is nothing but the awareness of the intelligence in the dynamism that permeates all manifestation. As we have seen, the dynamism of Being follows an organic path of unfoldment as it draws all manifestation toward the realization of its true nature. This optimizing force is inherent to the dynamism itself and is therefore operating at all times. However, at the surface of consciousness where our soul has become identified with external life, the optimizing force is generally obscured by the soul’s outward fixations. The unconscious longing for parental guidance continues to dominate the soul’s journey through life. From this level, the soul, as it develops, appears undirected, ignorant, and therefore in need of external guidance. As long as our orientation goes outward in order to seek meaning and direction, we will be unable to recognize the optimizing force that is already operating within us. True guidance appears only when we are willing to value our own experience as it is, and in that way attune ourselves to the signs and messages of optimization that are always present in the field of our experience.

The direction of the optimizing force is toward developing and unfolding our experience so that we can actualize the complete human being that we are, the wholeness we can be. However, we do not have to think in terms of goals, for this would be anthropomorphizing Being’s dynamism. Being’s gravity simply moves it toward settling into its original, primordial, and pure condition, just as turbid water tends to settle, returning to its clear and transparent original condition. We recognize this gravitational pull of true nature as its optimizing force, for optimal experience is nothing but the experience of true nature. Being is always inherently optimizing our experience. The optimizing force is aware and intelligent, trying to go around obstacles or go through them, whichever way will allow the optimization to continue. Realizing that our experience, both inner and outer, always reflects the action of our Being’s dynamism means that, in principle, it is always possible to know whether we are aligned or not with the optimizing force of Being, to discern whether we are progressing, backtracking, or on idle. We don’t need someone else to tell us. All the information we need is in our experience at each moment if we can perceive it clearly.

The dynamism of Being is creative; it is what underlies all change and movement in the universe. At the same time, since Being is essentially true nature, free and open, this dynamism possesses an inherent tendency to reveal true nature, with all its purity, beauty, and subtlety. This revelation appears as an inherent direction of the dynamism in the human soul. In other words, when the dynamism functions freely and spontaneously, without the cramping and distorting influence of our conventional minds, it tends to transform our experience and perception toward greater clarity, knowledge, openness, truth, and freedom. We call this evolutionary tendency the optimizing force of the dynamism of Being. We experience the dynamism of Being in the fact that our personal experience is constantly changing. One state follows another, one feeling replaces another, thoughts and images come and go in a never ending stream. But when the optimizing force is operating in us, our experience begins to deepen and expand, revealing new states, dimensions, and capacities. We refer to this changing, evolutionary flow of our experience as unfoldment. Our soul is then revealing its inherent potentialities. From this we see that the unfoldment of the soul is a direct expression of the optimizing creative force of Being’s dynamism.

The optimizing force of the logos functions throughout manifest reality, in both the animate and inanimate worlds. We do not always understand its direction, for its intelligence is cosmic and spans all time. But we can recognize signs of its functioning in the self-organizing properties of the universe, in various cosmological and terrestrial developments, in the arising and evolution of life, in the development of each living organism in its growth and maturation, even its decay and death. In other words, the logos is not only the principle of change and movement, but also of development and evolution, of growth and maturation, of both body and soul. This understanding may help us to recognize that the totality of the manifest universe is not only unfolding and changing but that it is also developing and evolving. And the direction of this evolution is the optimization of manifestation in order that all forms embody and express true nature in as complete and total a manner as possible, appropriate for the capacity of the particular form. We can easily understand this when we remember that the logos is the way true nature expresses and reveals its infinite potentialities

But the optimizing thrust does not function only by focusing on the problems or the barriers. It illuminates the entire mandala. Sometimes the illumination is focused on understanding the essential presence itself. Engaging in that understanding can lead to the central part of the second journey, which is the luminous thread itself, the awareness of the presence itself. You are aware of it, and you are feeling it as the center of your experience because it is the deepest and most transformative force in your experience. And it will affect the totality of your experience. I don’t that mean that it will transform your experience totally every time this awareness arises. But it is a force, so it will begin impacting, transforming, and clarifying your experience. So the work, then, which is the work of inquiry, is a matter of being present, being aware of the presence, and of understanding it and its interaction with the rest of your experience. The presence will change from one quality to another, from one dimension to another, and these transubstantiations will bring about changes in the totality of your mandala. They will activate different object relations, different identifications, different feelings, different memories. All the situations and relationships in your life will be impacted.

All of our experiences, all of our perceptions, are basically due to the dynamism of our Being. And all of them reflect the optimizing force functioning in either a straightforward manner or a distorted manner. There are, in other words, no accidental experiences, no chance inner states. Whatever arises is in us, whatever we experience in the world is a response, or manifestation, of our Being. And our Being functions as optimally as it can, given the presence or absence and the quality of our filters.