The soul looks at one element of an experience and eliminates everything else. Then, of course, the person misses the true benefits, the complete impact of these experiences. It is only by immersing oneself in these fundamental states of consciousness that the soul will be transformed. Your soul is the consciousness in which all states of consciousness arise. When deep states arise, they can transform your soul. The mere arising of an experience, and liking it or not liking it, is not enough to transform the consciousness. The consciousness has to get into it and be touched, be burned by it. Otherwise, it cannot transform.

The soul is a presence that is continually moving and changing; it cannot be static. The dynamic force underlying this constant change possesses an evolutionary bent, an optimizing property. It inherently tends to move the soul toward more optimal experience and life. It brings in more life, more energy, and more light. It is an organic, nonmechanical force that evolves and optimizes our experience. And it empowers our soul to develop and unfold, not in isolation but in relationship and response to what is going on in our life. In that sense, it is a conscious force, an aware, intelligent force.

The awareness of the existence of the soul’s true nature constitutes the core understanding in all major spiritual teachings. The primary understanding in any authentic experience of spiritual realization is that our soul (our self, our consciousness) possesses a true nature – its essence. Being is the essence or true nature of the soul, as it is of all manifestation. In the Diamond Approach, we use the word Essence to refer to the specific experience of Being in its various aspects when it arises as the nature of the human soul.

Being manifests itself to itself through us, as human beings. In us, Being beholds its beauty and celebrates its majesty. Our experience of ourselves in our totality and the tangibility is what in the Diamond Approach we mean by the term soul. The soul is what experiences, and it is the lived experience itself. It is the inner, psychic organism, the individual consciousness that is the site of all experience. The human soul is pure potentiality, the potentiality of Being. It is also the way that Being, in all its magnificence, opens up and manifests its richness. To experience the richness of our Being, the potential of our soul, we must allow our experience to become more and more open, and increasingly question what we assume we are.

The most striking aspects of this organism which is the self, or soul, are its malleability, sensitivity, intelligence and dynamism. The soul can take many forms; it is not a rigid structure but a flowing, conscious Presence with certain inherent capacities and faculties. The soul learns and the soul acts.

The Essential Identity functions similarly to other aspects with a dual function of providing a capacity necessity for the life and development of the soul and connecting her to the Absolute in a specific way that reveals the nature of this connection. The Essential Aspect of identity, the point of light and Presence, provides the soul with the center and identity necessary for her life, which will at the same time ultimately connect her with the Absolute, as her final and absolute identity.

The soul, as an alive conscious Presence, is ultimately not separate from the structures which form the ego. It is when they are taken as the self’s identity that these structures alienate the soul’s experience of its true nature.

The soul can be experienced in many ways. It can be experienced patterned by an ego structure—image, notion or concept—so it appears as a shell, veil, tube, thickness, hardness, and so on. It can also manifest as free from structure, and the experience is then of a formless, blobby or watery substance. It can manifest as imbued by its essential nature, and it is experienced then as an alive and dynamic presence. And it can manifest in its basic mode, before any structure or development, and then it appears as a formless fluid presence. This basic substance of the soul is experienced specifically as a plasmatic fluid, similar to the plasmatic substrate of the physical body.

In the nondual condition, the individual consciousness is not foreground. The self disappears, the individual disappears, even the soul disappears—there is only reality. There is only nondual presence. However, if there were no individual consciousness, there would be no perception, no sensation, and no awareness of nondual truth manifesting its possibilities. So you, as an individual, are important for realization. Enlightenment needs you to recognize itself; it needs you as an individual. In nondual truth, your sense of who you are is not as an individual. You are the Living Being that is the nature of everything and that is manifesting and creating everything. However, you as an individual who is practicing is how this nondual truth is recognizing its enlightenment.

From the perspective of self-realization, then, the soul is simply our consciousness, free from the occlusive veil of past experience. She can experience herself directly, without any intermediary. She is thus dispensing not only with the veil of past experience, but also with the self-reflective act. She experiences herself by simply being. She knows herself to be a presence, a self-aware medium in which the awareness is simply of presence itself. She is. She is presence, pure and simple. She is aware that she is presence because presence is indistinguishable from awareness.

When we make the journey with the Diamond Guidance, the soul at some point becomes the Guidance itself apprehending the absolute nature of everything. During the third journey, the Diamond Guidance is inseparable from the soul’s ongoing presence, shining with its exquisite precision, delicacy, refinement, intimacy, and indescribable beauty and freshness. We are sweetness, delight, warmth, appreciation, and preciousness. We experience ourselves at this stage as all these qualities in a presence that touches the Absolute – perceiving it and unifying with it. In other words, when our spacecruiser takes us to the Absolute, our consciousness becomes refined until it dissolves into the Absolute’s mysterious vastness.

In the course of spiritual development, as the soul begins to understand the truth and to develop through contact with Essence, it becomes clearer and purer. Eventually, it can be completely purified. The Sufi notion of the Perfect or Complete Soul is the completely developed soul, the completely purified soul. The Sufis say that the completely purified soul is colorless, completely transparent and clear. Thus, the soul has regained through purification its original essential nature of pure luminosity or pure awareness of how things are. At the same time, the soul has developed through maturity a discriminating awareness of reality that includes its nature, its environment, and everything else. The soul can thus have a mirror-like awareness that is transparent and without distortion, as well as a capacity for discrimination and understanding. So the simplest, most elemental nature of the soul is complete transparency without any qualities, just the fact of its awareness, perception, transparency, luminosity. This is the soul’s most basic nature. It is also what is called “primordial awareness.”

If we have the global awareness that comes through the development of mindfulness, it is possible to recognize that the true ground of our experience is actually a medium of awareness, rather than a collection of perceived objects. This medium of awareness that we call the soul has things bubbling in it. The bubbles are not separate from the medium, and the medium itself is self-aware. The bubbles are different colors and shapes: this bubble feels like sadness and that bubble feels like pain. This bubble feels like the idea of a bird and at that bubble feels like the thought of a person and this bubble is an image of our home. All these bubbles are arising in the same medium.

The soul, then, is not simply an organism of consciousness, but is also an organism of knowledge. When we recognize knowledge as the fabric of all experience, we cannot hold on to our habitual dichotomy of experiencer and experienced, knower and known. The knower is knowledge, the known is knowledge. The knower is the field, and the known is a form that this field assumes without ceasing to be the field. When we experience fear, our consciousness is the very sensations of the fear. The fear is the conscious field forming into fear, and knowing itself as fear. We might be experiencing fear in the belly, as some kind of vibration, an uncomfortable shakiness and irritation. Our consciousness is manifesting itself as fear in a particular region, and as consciousness we are aware of the fear in that region. We cannot actually separate the fear from the knowingness of the fear; they are the same arising in the belly. We do not actually know the fear in our head, even though we say we know it in our mind . . . . . In the conventional perspective, when we are not yet in touch with the inner field of presence, we experience an observer that observes the fear. The knower is separate from the known, maybe the knower is in the head, and the known is fear in the belly. However, in reality there is no duality of knower and known. We think there is duality only because we are not aware of the fabric of the soul. When we are, then we can see that the sense of the knower in the head is a manifestation in the conscious field, but so is the fear in the belly. They are both manifestations of the very same field of consciousness. Seeing this, we can recognize that the real knower is not the one in the head, but the consciousness that discerns the one in the head. We recognize then that the separation of the knower and the known is due to a certain perspective, a belief. Nevertheless, even this perspective is a thought form that the consciousness itself manifests. Nothing occurs in our experience that is not the manifestation of our consciousness, and here we are noting that this manifestation always involves knowledge. So both knower and known, whether appearing unified or as the self-object duality, are knowledge.

As we have seen, our soul reveals its possibilities through its creative dynamism in two basic ways. The first is in an open and free manner, the second through a distorted and disconnected process. In the former case, the soul manifests itself in a real and authentic way, while in the latter case, the soul becomes diminished, distorted, and disconnected from its true nature. Both of these experiences (authenticity and distortion) are inherent in the potential of our human soul.