To be an instrument of the absolute is to be its absolute servant, which is the same as being a complete, thoroughly ripened, and mature human adult. This is human happiness and fulfillment. This is the station of realization of the freedom vehicle, which is the reason we frequently refer to it as the body of service. We develop a new subtle body, which inherently recognizes its function as servicing the truth of Reality. It is a precise, clear, totally objective wisdom, completely free from subjective bias or reaction. This functioning may appear as a limitation when compared with the station of abiding in the absolute, and students tend to react to it in this manner, yet it is actually a deeper and higher realization. For in this station there is no preference at all; there is no need at all for any state or condition, not even for that of the absolute. Our freedom is that we are the absolute in its mystery, but at the same time we are also the individual soul with all of her development, life, and maturation. We are essence with all of its dimensions and aspects, but we are also the adult human being, a matured and completed person. 

In our adult life, the particular ways in which we refuse to see and experience love largely depend on our experience of love in early childhood. If love had been abundant from the beginning, it would be easy now for us to see it, accept it, and appreciate it. But if a large part of our experience was of love being limited or distorted one way or another, then it is difficult to experience love when it is here now—especially if it is distorted and mixed up with other things. So the limitations on the presence of love in our early childhood lead to limitations in our perception of and receptivity to love now, which limits the openness in our hearts to the love that is actually there for us. For instance, as a child you might not have wanted to see your mother’s love. You may have found yourself wanting to push those rare moments away. Perhaps this is because if you allowed yourself to feel her love, you would also have had to feel all the pain, all the hurt, and all the deprivation of not getting love at other times. For many children, it was better to sacrifice moments of love in order to avoid feeling the more prevalent pain of disappointment and loss. Or you may have been afraid that if you let in your mother’s love, you would never separate from her. So you had to say, “No, she doesn’t really care about me. She only wants to hold on to me.” Yes, she might have wanted to hold on to you, but that doesn’t mean that she didn’t love you. But in order to feel justified in separating, you had to say, “There is no love.” Both situations would likely cause difficulty in receiving love later in life. These examples show that not being able to see love becomes a barrier, a veil, that we need to work on. 

The essential person may or may not have many external achievements, but his achievements are more meaningful to him, giving him a sense of pleasure and value because they are the expression of essential qualities. It is not uncommon that an individual is successful, accomplished, and even creative, but feels no pleasure or value related to these manifestations of his life. He still feels empty, insignificant and shallow, with low self-esteem. What has happened in this character is that some of his ego functions have been developed and integrated so that he can function well. However, this was not accompanied by sufficient emotional integration and development. So he is an adult on the functional level but an immature child on the emotional level. His functioning capacities have exceeded his emotional development. The final result is that he does not feel connected to his functioning, and hence, to his accomplishments. His functional self is disconnected from his sense of self or being, and his actions are mechanical, even though efficient. He does not derive pleasure or value from them because he is not connected to them. He feels as if somebody else has done all these things. Object relations theory views this type of character development as a result of precocious ego development, when the ego capacities mature, for one reason or another, faster than emotional development. One grows up on the surface, but one’s inner growth lags behind. Functioning, in other words, develops outside of object relations. As a result, a gap is created between who one feels oneself deeply to be and what one can do in the external world.

This is a true life, then: instead of trying to get satisfaction, fulfillment, happiness, love, we allow ourselves to have basic trust. Then all that we do, our relationships and all our activities, are an expression of the satisfaction, fulfillment and love. The true life is a spontaneous activity that arises out of our essence, and there is no need for the efforting kind of will. You’ve got everything. You simply need to see the truth, and what needs to happen just happens. You don’t need to do anything about it. The functioning of true will causes you to do what is needed: if you need to go buy something from the store, or to talk with someone about something, the impulse will come spontaneously. You don’t need to ruminate about it. All of you have had such experiences, when everything flows spontaneously. You just do what’s right. As adult human beings, we actually have the capacity always to do what is right, for ourselves and for everyone else. We have lost that confidence, that basic trust. And we see that the way to have it is actually to start doing it. It’s not something you gain; you actually practice it. You practice it by staying with what is there, by not going along with the usual tendency to reject what is there and try to get something else. Most of our discontent, pain and discomfort is the result of losing a part of ourselves. It’s not because of the economy; it’s not because we are ugly or fat or this or that. These are not the real reasons. So trying to get fulfillment by solving these supposed problems doesn’t work. The dissatisfaction comes from not allowing ourselves to experience a part of us. We are full of holes, and the only way we can be fulfilled and complete is to stay with those holes so that part of us is allowed to manifest and function. This cannot happen as long as we try to fill our holes with something else. We are beings who exist or were created a certain way; when we allow ourselves to be the way we are, then everything goes well. That’s what we will learn in time, and it may take time: our lack of trust is habitual. We keep believing in the wrong perspective, in our deficiency. But in time we might see that there is no need to believe in it. We are full. We can be complete; that is our natural state. If we allow ourselves to be, naturally, everything will circulate and will happen as it is meant to happen. 

This is a significant fact which is relevant to the relationship between the birth of ego and the birth of the Personal Essence. Many work systems and their teachings consider ego a preliminary stage that precedes the conscious existence of Being. Ego existence is considered the childhood of humanity. When a human being truly grows up and becomes an essential adult, he lives the life of Being. This is one reason the Sufis call the man of Being the “complete” man, and the man of ego the “unregenerate” or “undeveloped” man. The source of this point of view is the fact that the man of Being is almost always one who has experienced a new birth and development, which was preceded by identification with the ego. It is rare that a human being is from the beginning essential; if such a person appears, he is what the Sufis call a prophet. In this book we will develop a different point of view. We will view the Personal Essence as what is meant to be developed through the separation-individuation process (or any model of ego development). We see ego development, as it usually manifests in the birth of a separate individuality, as an incomplete or arrested development. We will explore this theme fully later. For now we continue with our discussion of the characteristics of the Personal Essence. 

It is easy to observe this malleability of the soul. For example, a strong and repeated experience in childhood can render one so stuck with the forms of that time that even though one becomes an adult, one may continue to feel and behave according to these forms, as if one is still a child having these experiences. A more extreme example is the intensity and frozenness of feelings and memories in posttraumatic stress disorder, resulting for instance from war trauma. The soldier will continue to feel and behave in ways that are not appropriate, because his inner experience of himself and world is frozen into a fixed structure that can last a lifetime. The malleability of the soul allows her to be affected by her perception and inner experience, and this effect can be lasting. This phenomenon is everyone’s common experience; it is a normal part of being human, and more basically part of being alive. Here, however, we are exploring exactly how this happens. We want to understand the basic properties of the soul responsible not only for her being affected, but also for her retaining such effects. 

The tremendous and omnipresent forces and influences that suppress essence are the same ones that work against retrieving it. Thus it is extremely difficult for most people to extricate themselves enough to taste essence or to know life from its perspective. In childhood, the forces were all external. But for the adult, these external forces have extended inward and have taken over the mind and the body. The individual in the process of ego development actually has imbibed his personality from the environment, and now he is the personality. The enemy of the essence is no more only in the environment. The greatest adversary now is one's own personality. Now the personality, both inside and outside, works on all levels to solidify its position as the master and the center. The life becomes its life. This happens in all of the gross ways visible to us and in more subtle ways than can be seen by most people. Hence, the work on retrieving essence is primarily wrestling with the personality until it relinquishes its hold and surrenders its position to the true master, the human essence. This endeavor, called the Work by most teachings oriented toward essence, becomes for the people who understand it the most worthy undertaking for man because without it man remains a potential, and the true human life is not realized. Without the realization of essence, every other undertaking is bound to be pointless, a waste. It is like an apple tree that is not allowed to bear apples. In fact, it is worse—it is like a larva that never becomes a butterfly. 

In a sense, what is generally called “the life of an adult” is really just a second babyhood. When we are children, the functions of nourishment, care, protection, release of tension, and comfort are provided by the parents—particularly by the mother when the child is an infant. As the personality of the child develops, the child becomes more independent of the mother, but this is accomplished by introjecting the mother, recreating her inside. You have your mother inside you and so, in a sense, you are still a baby. You still have your mother around, and you believe you need her. That is why, when you go deep inside yourself in the Work, you start realizing how much you want your mother, how much you don’t want to lose her, how much you fear separation, all of that. Deep inside, you still believe that you need Mother around. The mother inside you is not a physical thing; you have her emotionally in your unconscious. You behave like her, and you seek out people like her. You feel the way she felt, or you find people who treat you the way she treated you. In these ways, you always have Mother around. The ego or the personality of an adult is really a baby, except that now the mother is in a different form. Even those who deny they want mother, who had a negative experience of mother, continue to unconsciously seek the negative mother while consciously feeling the opposite. The mother is still pretty much the same mother you had before. You project that image outside and want other people to be like her, or you look for other people to perform those mothering functions for you, or you look to society for security, or comfort, or sustenance.   

What essentially happens in the process of really growing up is that you don’t need your mother or your father any more. You don’t need to have your mother inside you or outside you. In the course of dissolving the mother inside you, you have to deal with the fear that there will be nothing there to support, protect, comfort, or nourish you. You must learn that you have these capacities in yourself. What takes the place of the mother—first the physical and then the psychological mother—is your essence. To recognize, realize, integrate, and develop your essence is to become an adult. Your essence is you. It is not something you learn from your mother. It is not being like her or relating to your superego. It is being your real self. Then you will have what your mother gave you in your physical babyhood: love, compassion, support, intelligence, consciousness, protection, pleasure, fulfillment, release—all these things. Essence can give you these things because Essence is support, is strength, is intelligence, and so on. If you look to others for these things, you will get exactly what’s there. And what is that? Psychological babyhood. Essentially, everybody is deficient and hungry, psychologically poor, weak, unconscious. What you get from the outside is frustration, suffering, pain, and disappointment. Only if you turn to Essence will you find real love, support, consciousness, intelligence, strength, and protection. That is where they exist in a pure way. It is a basic and obvious truth that if you turn toward the outside world, you will get the pain that prevails there, and if you turn toward Essence, you will find those things you want. You will find your own essence, which is the source of all the things you thought you wanted from the outside. So the process of growing up is learning that basic law and learning how to turn towards it more and more until you are completely, totally, the very nature of your essence, seeing that it is all there, all that you need. 

Although it is true, as object relations theory states, that the sense of being a separate entity is a result of construction of bounded ego structures, the fact remains that the human being does exist in an objective sense before he has any sense of individual boundaries. Thus, ego boundaries are not necessary for bare existence. The adult ego, however, cannot even conceive of how one could exist without being an individual. The closest he can come to such conception is the possibility that one might not be consciously aware that he is a separate individual, but is still existing as a separate individual. For instance in times of complete absorption in some activity, or in sleep, one is not aware that he is an entity, but one naturally thinks that certainly he is. Most people, including psychologists, believe that an infant is a separate entity, but that he does not know it yet, only gradually coming to this realization. However this is not exact. The infant does not come to the realization that he is a separate individual. It is not a realization; it is a development, the creation of something that was not there to begin with. From the perspective of Being, as we have discussed, it is very clear that these ego boundaries are actually concepts, which involve emotional attachment to a certain image of the self. They are seen as ideas, empty of any fundamental or objective validity. In other words, the perception of Being is that there is no such thing as a separate individuality. Confronting this truth is positively terrifying to ego. We have seen how difficult it is to surrender the sense of self, but that is nothing compared to the letting go of one’s separating boundaries. It is not only difficult and terrifying as it approaches; it is completely inconceivable by the individual. This impossibility of conceiving of personal existence without the separating individual boundaries causes many misunderstandings. 

Growing up and maturing through the experiences the world has offered us has been important for our development. The next level of development involves starting out as a child in the spiritual world and maturing into adulthood by becoming a complete human being who knows her true nature and is nourished through it. In other words, the adult of this world is the child of the spiritual world. The adult of the spiritual world has a foot in both worlds and feels them as one. And real relating can only happen between two mature adults. The more mature we are, the more the relational field can open to new potential, and the less the past dictates the content of experience. Our maturational process does not flourish if we disregard this world, push it away, or disown our parents. It is a matter of embracing everything and finding an opening to that other possibility, that next dimension of experience —the inner dimensions. Scientists say there are many physical dimensions that we don’t know about. Who knows—perhaps this is the only way they can interpret the evidence they are finding. What is true, and what many of you actually know, is that our inner dimensions are rich and full, and that they are many and varied. By “inner,” I don’t mean only inside our bodies, I mean the inner nature of everything. Opening to the inner dimensions of experience is the completion of our maturational process. 

In this school, we have the opportunity to grow up. It is a school to grow up in. In society at large, the usual situation is like a nursery full of little children. The main difference between an actual nursery and society at large is that a nursery is recognized as a nursery while society at large believes that everyone is an adult even though everybody is still a child pretending to be an adult. In a nursery, a child doesn’t pretend he is an adult. Our Work is to learn what it is really like to be an adult, to find out what growing up is really about. Because of that, we can’t treat people like children here, or they’ll never grow up. All the problems you have exist, quite simply, because you don’t want to grow up. You don’t want to behave like a grown-up; you want to continue being a little baby. The fact that you don’t want to grow up, that you want to continue being a baby, explains almost everything you feel. It explains, for instance, the common pattern of people being angry at the teacher for not doing or being enough for them. They say, “Why don’t you do more for me? Why is it so difficult?” What they’re really saying is “You’re not a good mommy!” This is exactly how babies feel when mother is not being what they want. An adult does not think that way. An adult looks at the situation and asks, “What is the best way this situation can be used? What can I get out of it?” 

We can see that the merging love issue is one of the main unconscious determinants motivating adults toward intimate love relationships and is also the reason behind many of the difficulties in relationships. It is well known in depth psychology that people see their mothers in their love partners. This happens, of course, because individuals deeply feel and believe that their incompleteness will be eliminated and their longing will be satisfied by regaining the gratifying merged relationship with the mother, now displaced to a person of the opposite sex. This is probably the origin of the idea that a partner of the opposite sex is our “second half,” or our complement. What the person really wants and misses is part of his essence, the merging love, and is not the love partner or the relation with him or her. The individual believes that what is missing is the other half, or the intimate relationship, because that is what the child was able to see at the time of the original loss. The adult, like the child, does not know consciously that what is missing is part of oneself. So the search for fulfillment is directed outward, although the only thing that will actually work is the retrieval of the lost aspect of essence, the merging love. Therefore, intimate couple relationships will not be completely satisfying if the person is not able to experience this aspect of essence. The partner or the relationship cannot be but a poor substitute for the merging essence. And the partner will usually be blamed for the frustration, although the frustration doesn't have much to do with the partner. We are not condemning intimate love relationships or the desire for them; we are attempting to provide an understanding of one of their dynamics, a dynamic that usually causes great confusion and conflict about such relationships if not understood and resolved. 

So we see that very few people have been able to do the Work, to learn what Essence is and know the fullness of what it is to be a true human being, an adult of the species rather than a baby. Most people are only a few years old in terms of their essential development. Very few adults exist. It is the developments in psychology that have occurred primarily in the twentieth century that allow us to see how people are stuck in, and controlled by, their childhood conditioning. The approach of psychology and psychotherapy, which has arisen in the West, is a new approach to the problem of emotional suffering. Since the time of Freud, much knowledge has accumulated about the unconscious and the personality. Psychology, the science of the mind, provides a lot of understanding that has been lacking in the Work. But those who developed the knowledge and practice of psychology are not, in general, those who are in the Work. They work to alleviate suffering by trying to resolve conflicts on an emotional level. As a rule, Essence is not recognized in psychology and psychotherapy, so the alienation from Essence is not seen. It is seen that people are not in touch with their emotions and their sensations; it is seen that people are controlled by complex structures of unconscious beliefs, fears, and defenses. But that extra dimension, the existence of the true being, is not generally seen or taken into consideration in psychological theory.

These observations about old people and the obvious unusual aliveness of young children can more easily be accounted for when we recognize that life is a property of the soul. When we are in touch with ourselves, not conflicted with ourselves, not repressed or divided within, then we are more in touch with our soul, and hence with her inherent property of life. Young children are generally less conflicted and divided within themselves than adults; they generally have much less repression, and their ego structures are less rigidly in place, than those of adults. As we will see in chapters 12 and 14, where we discuss how repression and ego structures affect the life of the soul, we are generally less directly in touch with the conscious field of the soul in adulthood. We are less experientially open, more defensive, and more bound up with ego defense mechanisms in our adult years. Our losing touch with the sense of the soul explains why our sense of aliveness diminishes in some ways as we grow up; aliveness is a property of the field of sensitivity of the soul. And it seems that the few old individuals who retain an unusual aliveness must be more in touch with the fullness of their soul than most of us. Their physical deterioration does not limit their contact with their soul, the wellspring of their life.