The quality of Essence that gives you this energy also gives you a sense of bigness, the capacity to expand, which provides your inquiry with bigger, more robust and healthy muscles for doing investigation. The red latifa is the presence of fullness that is not separate from the presence of strength. It is as if your whole body were full of robust blood, pervaded with a pulsing, alive, dynamic quality. You feel as if your blood has a lot of hemoglobin in it, a lot of pure oxygen, and you feel vibrant, vital, and capable.

So when the going gets tough and we start thinking, “I don’t know if I can continue this inquiry; it’s too difficult,” our true nature can manifest what is needed. In this case, it is the quality of our true nature that we call the Red latifa. It gives us the sense that “Yes, I can do it, I’ve got what it takes,” so we don’t feel overwhelmed and give up. The Red Essence is the quality that will keep our inquiry from collapsing. You have probably noticed that even when you’re not confronted by blocks or challenges to your inquiry, simply engaging this subtle process of observing your experience and investigating it requires energy. If you’re tired, it will be difficult to effectively engage the process; the most you can do is be aware of what you are experiencing. It takes energy to go beyond that basic awareness—to understand the truth that lies hidden within our experience. Inquiry takes a lot more energy than doing your job because it takes all of you, all of the capacities of your psyche. Even when you’re not tired and not avoiding difficult issues, you still need energy to inquire. You need energy in order to be open and interested enough to remain engaged with such a subtle process, to allow such a subtle capacity as our inner guidance to function. That’s why it is important to practice inquiry when you feel energetic and robust, when you have vitality. That is also why you need to live in such a way that you have sufficient energy for inquiry, just as would be needed for doing any other inner practice. So if you’re really serious about engaging this work, you need to conserve your energy and balance your life so that you can be effective in your inquiry.

Is relatively easy to see that much of our opaqueness, much of our lack of openness, much of our stuckness, is due to the attacks of the superego – ours and other people’s. These are the criticisms, the putdowns, the comparisons, the judgments, the devaluations, the blaming, the shaming, the rejection, and the hatred that the superego levels at you in all kinds of situations. Here the Red latifa can specifically be used in the service of inquiry, by giving us the strength to defend against the superego.

The human soul will have to separate in order to know itself, which means fundamentally that it will have to develop a discriminated self. It has to know that it is different and how it is different from other things and other people. Otherwise, there is no self-knowledge, no individuation. However, in addition to discrimination in order to separate we need strength; we need to feel strong enough to be able to stand on our own... This brings us back to the function of the Red latifa. The Strength Essence is useful for the inquiry in giving us the strength to begin to discriminate. The more active the Red Essence, the more powerful, precise, and real our capacity for discrimination becomes. The more we discriminate, the more we separate from our reactions and self-images, and the more we know ourselves for who we are, which lets us open up to true nature.