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 of 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. But it dissolves through this colorfully variegated, clear diamondness. This becomes a specific way of apprehending the Absolute, with the Diamond Guidance as the connecting lens for the soul. The next step is the self-realization of the Absolute. We become the Absolute witnessing the world through the Diamond Guidance. The Diamond Guidance becomes the organ of perception of the Absolute—its multifaceted, precise eye. We perceive the world as a manifestation full of beauty and knowledge, but this beauty and knowledge appears with pristineness, delicacy, and an exquisite sharp precision. Everything appears diamond-like; it’s not only beautiful, it’s itself, precisely and exactly.

What is the absolute nature, then, whether we are referring to the unmanifest absolute or the absolute dimension? We have discussed its qualities of stillness, silence, peace, nonbeing, and emptiness. But we can also experience it as an immensity, a solidity and presence. One way of understanding this is to use the notion of the three major centers of subtle physiology, the belly center or hara, the heart center, and the head center. When we experience the absolute through the belly center, we experience it as a solid and immense presence, more substantial than any physical substance. We feel we are more fundamental, more basic, than anything else; all manifestation, including the physical world, appears as ephemeral and wispy. Yet, when we sense inside that we cannot find anything, there is no sensation of any quality. We are completely empty inside, so empty that our inside is total absence. The full impression is that we are so light and free because we are total absence; yet at the same time we are immense and solid for we are the most fundamental truth ………… When we are precise and exact in our understanding of the absolute nature, the solidity can attain a faceted and crystalline quality. We experience ourselves then as a crystalline absence, a clear and absolutely transparent immensity. This experience is completely paradoxical. We feel totally solid and full, with crystalline sharpness and clarity, yet simultaneously we feel so light, so empty, so not there, that we are the absolute absence of anything. We are both simultaneously, a quality of experience completely incomprehensible to the conceptual mind. Yet it is the most beautiful, the most aesthetically satisfying, and the most dazzling of perceptions. We feel fully present, but our presence is so smooth and crystalline because it is solid absence, with no coarseness and no opaqueness.

When we experience the absolute through the heart modality, the absolute attains a sense of gentleness and simplicity. We feel the same fullness and emptiness, but now with a softness, a gentleness, and an amazing contentment. We feel light and simple, easy and at ease. The most characteristic element of the heart experience is an amazing sense of intimacy. Since the absolute is the being of nonbeing it is totally transparent and absolutely free of obscurations. The sense of absence means the absence of all qualities; hence it has nothing to hinder perception and contact. This means there is nothing, no intermediary, between our awareness and whatever we are experiencing. We are experiencing the absolute inside of everything. Such nearness to the secret chamber of any and all manifestation appears as the most total and the most exquisite intimacy.

When we experience the absolute through the mind modality, it attains the greatest subtlety. It is total absence, with the slightest hint of presence. The presence is like a subtle glimmer to the absence, giving it a slight sense of presence that easily melts into nonbeing. The lightness is greatest here, so much freedom, so much space, so much openness. We are so free we are almost not here; it is like we have overcome gravity and feel no more heaviness of any kind. Even the slight, almost absent, sense of presence can attain a crystalline quality that gives it precision and brilliance. We feel so free and so awake, so clear and so bright; yet there is nothing there: total selflessness.

Openness is the basis, the ground, of inquiry because openness is the manifestation and expression of the depth of our true nature, the fact of its total emptiness, lightness, and mystery. This inherent freedom, this complete mystery at the very depth of our soul, engages its loving dynamism to reveal itself. But we normally experience that as a questioning, as an inquiring attitude. This openness and mystery is the essence of inquiry, but we normally do not see that because we are looking from the outside. From that perspective, we see the essence of inquiry as being the activity of questioning. But the more we go into the experience, and inquiry deepens and deepens and deepens, its questioning core meets the original openness and lightness, and we recognize that they are one and always have been one. Inquiry finally unifies the soul with its essential home—with its absolute nature—through the bridge of openness. As I have said, if we are interested in true inquiry, if we really want to find out about reality, then we have to begin with not-knowing. We cannot start from a fixed position, a fixed predisposition, or an assumption about what we are going to find, what is going to happen, what we are going to do, and where we are going to end up.

Even consciousness, which is not exactly a concept, can be shed. At some point, usually without anticipating it, one realizes that one is perceiving the Nameless Reality as external to oneself. One becomes aware that one is beyond the Nameless, and the world that it supports, as an unknowable mystery. The Nonconceptual Reality, which is the ground of the world of concepts, is experienced here as not absolutely real. In fact, it is experienced as a radiance, ephemeral and insubstantial, in relation to and emanating from an unfathomable Absolute. One realizes that one’s most absolute nature, which turns out to be the underlying nature of all of existence, transcends not only the mind, but consciousness itself. One is the beyond, beyond whatever can be experienced or perceived. Absence is seen as an incomplete glimpse into the Absolute. One is the ultimate subject, which cannot be an object of perception, and hence is unknown and unknowable. The Absolute is not aware of itself, but awareness of everything else proceeds from it, while what characterizes consciousness is that it is conscious of itself.

Our nature, which is the depth of reality, is oneness, a complete unity, and it is deep, silent, and still. But this absolute nature of ours does not live alone. It is always in divine union with its consort—the creative power and energy that brings everything forward into manifestation. There is the unmanifest and there is the manifest, which are two sides of the same thing. It is not that manifestation comes out of the unmanifest, which is behind it. Yes, there is the unmanifest back and the manifest front, and if you slice them, there is yet again a back and a front at every point; but the spaciousness of the unmanifest and the presence of the manifest always arise as one interpenetrated unity. Within physical manifestation we have both the depth of our nature and the surface of the particular forms, which are always in union, always as one.

Normally we have a continuous subjective feeling of the realness of things, a feeling that gives our ego-self a sense of security, the sense that its supports ultimately exist. By perceiving the absolute nature of things this feelings ceases, for it turns out to be a psychological outcome of the belief in the ultimate self-existence of things. But this does not mean that objectively things are not real in the sense that they do not manifest independent of our thoughts. Things are noetic forms, even prenoetic, but they simply do not possess the kind of reality we have been accustomed to giving them. In fact, in such perception we see true Reality; we see how things actually are. We are truly in Reality, but it does not have the same psychological sense to which we are accustomed. Realness turns out to be a concept, and our perception has now gone beyond concepts, to the core of things. We experience freedom and liberation, and are finally released from the need to support our ego-self with the sense of solidity, substance, and reality. We do not need any supports, for reality has no supports; it is all a magical display of colors and shapes, of presence that is simultaneously insubstantial and rich. We are beyond the conceptual mind, and the dichotomy of being and nonbeing.