Disappearing is really wonderful, is beautiful. Everything else within the realm of consciousness is paltry compared to it. Once you experience absolute absence, you know that all the wonderful sublime states of essence, of being, of consciousness and God realization are all on one side and the Absolute is on the other side. Regardless of how sublime and wonderful, these states are not one-millionth as wonderful as the state of the Absolute. Consider the highest, deepest experience of consciousness you have, the most fulfilled and blissful condition. Now imagine a state a million times more satisfying and liberating. That is the Absolute.

If you want to live a more fulfilling life, you have to develop a taste for certain values, a taste for truth and understanding, depth and profundity, precision and exquisiteness, dignity and integrity. These refined values are subtle rather than gross. They will lead to a refined human life, infused with natural beauty, colorful and rich. All of these things are present all the time—you don’t have to achieve them, you just need to appreciate them. You need to begin to love them and orient yourself towards them so that you allow yourself the time and opportunity for them to emerge.

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.

Without mind, there is no variety, discrimination or differentiation; we see no form and hence, no beauty. Mind is the creator of form, the creator of beauty, and understanding is that process of creation, of unfoldment. So, the fulfillment of our life is to see life objectively, to see what’s really there. To know, for example, that life is the expression and fulfillment and celebration of beauty. This is what we are here for. We’re not here for anything else. Everyone wants this life of fulfillment, beauty and harmony, but most people want to reach it without going through the process of understanding. They want it to come from someone else through some magical transmission. They don’t want to do it by understanding. But the process is understanding, and can happen in no other way.

A concept, a thought, or an idea might arise out of the experience of essence, might be generated under the influence of essence. This sometimes happens in expansive ideas of discovery and revelation. But the thought is not essence. The influence of essence on mind is most obvious in certain kinds of poetry written when the poet gets a taste of essence—when the words, thoughts, ideas, and images are generated by essence and attempt to reflect and communicate the essential experience. Very often the poet is not directly aware of essence but is aware only of the idea, the image, and perhaps the emotion produced by the contact with essence. The poet may become so enamored of his words and images that he never moves to the actual direct experience of essence. The words can be beautiful and the images enchanting, but all this beauty and enchantment fall short of the beauty and enchantment of the essence itself. Poetry becomes more real when the poet is directly aware of the presence of essence. Then the words and images more closely reflect the truth and are less distorted by the personality of the poet. We call this kind of poetry objective poetry, which is a phenomenological description of the poet's experience of essence. This is the most beautiful, most inspiring, and most powerful poetry. Images that simply describe essence surpass in beauty the imagination of any poet, for essence is the source, the power, and the stuff of poetry. But even the most accurate and powerful description of essence is not, we must remember, essence itself.

True nature, the Essence of the soul, is valuable, is worthy of appreciation and love, not because it gives her something, not because it adds to her, not because it liberates her, but because it is beautiful. Its value is in its beauty and perfection. Its truth is its value, and this truth is the essence of all beauty. The beauty of a form turns out to be this transparency to true nature. The more a manifest form expresses and embodies true nature with its timeless features, the more the eyes of the soul behold it as beautiful. Beauty is a reflection of truth, and truth is ultimately true nature. And the dimension of true nature that reveals this essential beauty is that of divine love.

Essential substance is so beautiful and magnificent that no imagination can conceive of its beauty, and no poetry can convey its magnificence. The way it moves us and teaches us is beyond the wildest dreams and imaginations of humanity. Its potentialities are staggering, its creativity is boundless, its depth is endless, and its intelligence is limitless. It is a wonder—a wonder beyond all miracles. It is our true nature, our most intimate identity. This wonder is not just for stories or poetry. It is not just to dream about or long for. It is not just to give us flashes of its magnificence, or fleeting tastes of its significance. It is actually our human essence. It is who we are: our very beingness. We are to be this essence, to exist and live as essence. It is our potential to be our essence, not just in occasional experiences but always and permanently. It is our essence that can and should be what lives, and what should be the center of our life. It can and should be inseparable from us. The work of inner development is not aimed only at having an experience of essence. It is aimed at the complete realization of essence and the permanent existence of us as essence.

There is the sweet, fluffy kind of love, the merging and contented kind of love and then there is a third kind of love: passionate, powerful, consuming and ecstatic. You feel you’ve been taken by storm. Your mind is gone. You feel power and lustiness, passion and zest. You feel your whole being is burning like a flame and that flame is full, and that fullness is the love. You feel ecstasy, passion and no difference between desire, wanting, giving, receiving. It is all one consuming thing. I call it ecstatic, passionate love. This love is not only directed toward a person. It is again your beingness. You are the passion. It is true passion, not the passion of the emotions, which is fake passion. When you are passionately longing or passionately wanting, you are being your passionate self. But as true passionate love, you feel like a consuming force of life. When you look at life and existence, you’re not wanting something from it, you simply appreciate it and love it passionately because life and existence are so beautiful. Beauty is a part of that passion. What ignites that passion is beauty, the exquisite, luminous beauty of existence. Everything and everybody is beautiful, and every occurrence is beautiful. You are everything, as manifestation of sheer, wonderful beauty The more beauty you see, the more you burst with that passion. You love life. You want to love life because it is so wonderful, so beautiful, and you feel so ;strong about it. I call it “lion-hearted love.” Your heart is courageous and forceful. It does not occur to you to wonder, “Is this person going to like me?” You have no worries. Your heart is so full that there is no room for doubt or fear. You appreciate what is there. You take life fully, completely.