For some years now, our teaching has been emphasizing that realization is not simply a matter of arriving at the condition of Being, arriving at the condition of being our true nature, arriving at the condition of pure presence or pure awareness or emptiness. Realization is not only a matter of learning about and experiencing the depth of true nature; it comprises how to live what we know and how to express it fully. When we really learn to live our realization, we find that living our realization is not different from realization. Living the truth is not separate from the enlightenment or the awakening or the beingness. Living our realization first appears as simply extending our realization into greater areas and further circumstances, moving from an experience to a lived actuality. We find out that it is not simply the extending of the same state into activity, but rather that living our realization is realization realizing further and deeper and more complete realization. This is a point that we will explore more extensively in later chapters. When we fully explore what it means to live our realization, we discover that it means to practice uninterruptedly, to engage the work without cessation. Many people believe that realization signals the end of practice, the end of doing the work. We might think, “When I am realized, I won’t need to practice any longer; I can simply be.” When we are not realized, the situation appears that way. But from the perspective of realization, living is a matter of continual practice and continual engagement. This raises the question of the relationship between what we do on the path and the experience or the manifestation of freedom—in other words, the relationship between practice and realization. In this teaching that I am presenting, we want to understand practice from the perspective of realization, not from the perspective of nonrealization.

The true joy and the true celebration will arise the more we realize that we are purifying ourselves to be more worthy to serve the truth. Being the servant of the truth is part of our soul’s nature. The soul is the servant; the master is the truth. Whatever dimension of truth we happen to have realized is the master we serve. This is arriving at the station of servitude. The work of purification leads to that station of servitude, of being a good, worthy, and capable servant of the truth. One of the requirements of serving the objective truth, of serving God, of serving the Absolute, is to be fit for that service so that we won’t be living our selfish needs. We live our selfish needs when we serve our belief in having a separate existence. There isn’t a separate existence. We aren’t solitary souls bobbing around the universe. We are, as I’ve said many times, like God’s finger. We are an extension, a protrusion, of the truth. And if we don’t live that way, we won’t live according to the truth that is our nature, that is the nature of existence, that is how things are—the natural law. So one of the ways we can approach experience is through the realization that we’re working on developing ourselves spiritually, emotionally, and physically in order to be fit and worthy servants for the master that is truth. What does it mean to serve the truth? We serve the truth when we act according to the truth, when we express the truth in our life, when we see ourselves as the expression of the truth. We need to be purified enough to be attracted to the truth in such a way that the truth penetrates us. We are the expression of the truth when we have become transparent to it. The most objective sense of serving the truth, serving God, serving the Absolute, serving reality, is to express it purely in life.

At this stage of inquiry, our experience goes through a radical transformation. By dissolving the inner ego-stirrings of the soul that make her leave home, our soul settles and becomes one with her beautiful and exquisite nature. Our inner atmosphere partakes of that lucidity and silence, that satin smoothness, in which the annihilation of the image or the inner activity of the ego-self is experienced as a blissful cessation, a dying in complete ecstasy. Our soul feels rested, finally at home. There is precision, sharpness, and perception, but also complete stillness, as if the stillness itself had a sharpness and a discriminating quality that has evolved faceted edges. You experience yourself as inside, and part of, this very delicate, completely black, faceted diamond. And the whole world appears as the luminous shimmering of those facets. So as we learn to value not arriving, we arrive, for true arriving is a matter of not leaving, not departing. Usually, we are always leaving ourselves, always departing; and we think we are going someplace. When we try to go someplace, all we end up doing is separating from our true nature. We are always trying to find our true nature by going away from it. So inquiry takes us to the point where we simply recognize how we are leaving—and the ideas and beliefs that make us feel that we should leave. When it truly reveals its fundamental ground, inquiry teaches us not to go anywhere—because there is nowhere to go.

Furthermore, enlightenment and liberation, or the arriving home, is not only the realization of true nature. This realization is necessary for enlightenment; it is its experiential ground. Nevertheless, enlightenment also includes the absence of all structuring that may impede any of the basic dimensions of true nature, as those of basic knowledge and creative display of potential. Practically, this means the working through of all ego structures and issues. If there is a structure that one is not aware of, or has not worked through directly or indirectly, it is bound to obstruct or obscure true nature one way or another, at one time or another. Enlightenment has then two sides: the abiding in true nature and the liberation from all rigid and fixed structures. In fact, the more one is liberated from ego structures and their patterning influence the more one is able to abide in true nature.

As the Guest begins to reveal itself in the cavity of the heart, we see an amazing brilliance, pure luminosity like lightning that bedazzles you. As it approaches, the brilliance reveals a luminous blackness so absolutely black that it is the most luminous thing you can ever experience. The night of poverty suddenly changes to a luminous night, a radiant vastness so dark it is absolutely black, but so purely black it is luminous. We behold an immense majesty, an emptiness so void it is total transparency. Yet its beauty dazzles, its power intoxicates, and its intensity totally annihilates. To know it further, we can only reappear as the world, for there is no farther to go back. It is like arriving at the edge of the world and there is nowhere else to go. Our inner gaze simply switches to outer witnessing, the silent stillness witnessing all manifestation unfolding as its own bedazzling radiance. The Guest is pure unknowingness; there is no mind, no darkness and no light. There is no consciousness, nothing to be known and no one to know it. The Guest is pre-everything. Let’s say you become the absolute potential for all there is. But these are just words. We can say that you become the source of all you see. That’s a nice idea, but again the words fail to capture the reality. We can say you are before there was the word, but we’re still thinking of the word, the first word. But before the word, before you heard the first news, what was there? What was that like? It’s an absolutely unselfconscious spontaneity. When there is only the back that is the front, then there is only spontaneity. Spontaneity is blocked only when there are two. One says this, the other says that. When there is just the one, it is just spontaneity, without even knowing it. What is said is said completely. What is done is done totally, without an afterthought. And whatever is done or said is, by its very saying or its very doing, absolutely consumed, absolutely finished.

That’s why the Diamond Guidance is objective, precise, and exact. “Precise” in this case means, “No, this is not sadness, this is kindness. And the kindness is in some kind of spaciousness, and the spaciousness feels empty. And furthermore, this emptiness isn’t something bad; it’s just the nature of the situation that kindness always arises in some kind of spaciousness.” As we recognize the subtle, precise discriminations that the Guidance shows us, we see that we’re arriving at truth. But the truth is not a particular conclusion, such as an answer we have been seeking. Recognizing the truth means that we’re seeing the discrimination in our experience accurately, that our soul is unfolding exactly as it is. And when that occurs, we say we understand our experience. Our consciousness also has the capacity to name the specifics of the discrimination. But the discrimination itself precedes the naming. When we give names to the specifics, it becomes easy to remember them; we can write them down and store them as knowledge. But the experience itself comes first, then the differentiation, and then the discrimination, followed by the labeling. Of course, most of the time, these steps happen so quickly that they seem to be occurring at the same time. So we can’t tell them apart.

The heart, obviously, is very important here, but we need to free the heart. Most of the time the heart is dominated by the perspective of object relations. We experience various feelings and emotions according to our psychodynamic history. Actually, the heart is nothing but the mind filled with love. The heart gives fullness to the concepts of the mind. So the mind and the heart are not separate things. They’re one thing. Love and thinking are one thing. Both the mind and the heart need to be freed from the perspective of the physical world. The heart is freed from object relations by arriving at nonattachment. So we see, the task is not easy. It’s immense. But so what? What else are we going to do? If we’re going to find out what the truth is, then we’re going to find out what the truth is. How big or difficult or long doesn’t matter. For a long time, the student cannot help relating to the teaching and to essence and to truth in terms of object relations. You cannot help but do that. Seeing through object relations is hard, but that is the path. The path leads to the truth, you see.

The resolution of the dilemma, how to live in this world of objects and see objective reality, I am calling the resurrection. The resurrection means seeing the world of objects from a new perspective, as infused and united with and by the fourth dimension. Truth embodies the world. So instead of a world constructed of discrete objects that are inert, the world becomes a living world of harmony and oneness. Things are differentiated, but they are not separate. Functioning and doing and living life, then, is not some unusual thing of flying here or there, materializing or dematerializing. You live a normal life, but it’s a life of truth, of harmony, of fulfillment, a life that is unencumbered. There’s a freedom of how you see the fourth dimension. You live in harmony as a unique individual connected with everything else, and you see yourself as the oneness, or you see yourself as the ultimate ground and source of everything. The human consciousness goes through all of that and that becomes life.

What does inquiry do? It reveals the truth. The truth is already in the experience; we are just not seeing it. In the process of the truth emerging and our discriminating it, experience becomes clearer. Or we can say that we become clearer about our experience. So, as in the example discussed earlier, when that person recognizes that the reason he is angry at me is that I remind him of his mother, whom he is angry at, he becomes clearer about his relationship to me. The process of arriving at the new discrimination is one of clarification. Before that, he feels unclear; there is a dullness, a thickness, a vagueness. There is an unknowingness, an unconsciousness. Now he is clear; the situation is transparent and his experience is more lucid. In other words, understanding is a matter of clarity shining through the various manifestations, clarifying and dispelling obscurations and illuminating the truth. What is happening as we are clarifying is a rise in clarity. What is this rise in clarity? The whole field of experience, the whole soul, begins to become clearer. We become aware of the resistances and blockages, the wrong beliefs and fixed positions that cause such obscuration, dullness, and unclarity. And as we see them, we become clear about what they are and what they are about. As we become clear about them, we understand them and they are dispelled. Obscurations dissipate like clouds as clarity shines through. We discover more and more of the truth, and experience is illuminated. The truth begins to stand out and become manifest. This is the process we go through when we inquire. By understanding the experience through seeing its truth, we arrive at an objectivity about it. Arriving at this objectivity happens through clarifying our attitude about the experience as we clarify what the experience is. This process of recognizing the truth coincides with the soul herself, the consciousness, becoming clearer and more transparent, more luminous. We might not experience this directly as luminosity but as a greater intensity or as more specificity in what the experience is. Our awareness is now more intense, purer, clearer, and more lucid.