The Absolute and the Nameless are both nonconceptual. With the Nameless there is consciousness, and the Absolute is beyond consciousness. It’s the difference between the night and day. The night is Absolute, and the day is the Nameless or the nonconceptual. There is light. This light doesn’t bring any particular knowledge; it’s just pure light. The next thing that arises is that the nonconceptual, or pure awareness, manifests as existence or presence. We become aware of ourselves as existing. That is what I call the dimension of Pure Being, or the Supreme. Being then exists, and there is awareness that there is existence. The consciousness becomes aware of itself as existing. This is the beginning of the conceptual. The first concept that arises is Existence, Beingness, Presence. Here there is a concept, but there is still no differentiation. It’s not that someone exists. It’s not that I exist and you exist. There is one pure something, and that is Pure Beingness, Pure Existence. That is the first concept. If you go beyond that into the nonconceptual, you can’t talk about existence, or nonexistence. The Pure Beingness is experienced as unity—there’s just one thing. There is just one thing that doesn’t have parts. The perception of unity is like the perception that the whole body is made out of one thing. If it were only made of water, for instance, that would be unity. It is also possible to experience the whole as oneness. In this case, there is differentiation and discrimination; you can be aware of the parts, but still this differentiation does not mean separation. In oneness the perception is like you are aware of the elements the body is made of—for instance, that there is water, and there are carbon-based molecules, organs, and so on—and you cannot separate these elements.

You realize that the “nowness” and presence are your Beingness. And you begin to experience the presence of the Supreme Being as you, as yourself, in this moment. This experience enables you to see that the activity of resisting the present moment is exactly what has been separating you from Being. When there is ego activity, you might be aware of your being, but you are somewhere else. When the wheels are turning, they are pushing away who you are, separating you from Being. This separation is also what makes personality feel perpetually deficient. The moment you become aware of the vicious cycle of the activity of defensiveness, you will see clearly that what you have been rejecting is yourself, and that the rejection is useless and unnecessary. Then you will relax and stop. The complete perception of this cycle is the stopping of the wheels. Then the personality is dissolved by clarity. There is clarity because there is no movement in the personality separating it from Being.  As you can see, this insight comes only with a great deal of work. It takes a long time to get to the point of seeing the totality of ego activity. To see it experientially and directly rather than from a disidentified or transcendent perspective is made possible by a deep exploration of the territory of personality from within. This experience of Being relies on many kinds of realizations, understanding unconscious issues, and expansion into Being. When you are working on one particular issue you will see a part of this supreme reality, but working on all your issues makes it more possible to see the whole. 

We should always remember that there are many dimensions of being, so it’s possible in the Diamond Approach that we might first experience beingness as pure beingness. In my experience it first appeared as the divine being, and then I experienced it as the supreme being, then as the nameless being, then it became the absolute being, then it became the nondual being, and then it became the nonlocal being. Each one of them more mysterious than the last. By the time we get to the absolute being, we are already losing any possibility of a position about it. And when in time we get to nonlocal being, the mind doesn’t have anything to grasp on at all. That truly opens the unfoldment and allows it to be completely open-ended. Because being is endless, as Gurdjieff made clear when he called being “his endlessness.” Instead of saying “his majesty,” he said” his endlessness.” There really is no end, you see. It’s the same thing with the Kabbalistic Ain Soph. Some interpret it as “the infinite”, but the literal meaning is “no end.” 

At some point, one is suddenly the impersonal Being. One experiences a sense of absolute oneness. One is not the separate individual, but one is the oneness of all that exists. And after this perception, one experiences oneself emerging again as a personal presence. However, one is no more the withdrawn part of the personality. What emerges is the Personal Essence, with its fullness and preciousness. This is an experience of the complete integration of personality into Being. The personality, as an ego structure with its sense of self, becomes actually and experientially absorbed into Being; and the integration results in a new synthesis, the emergence of the Personal Essence. This is one of the ways that the Personal Essence can be born. The Sufis call this process the “remaining after extinction.” One is absorbed into the Supreme Being (the Sufis call it God), but then one is reborn, as an essential person. In this experience, the process of absorption is clear, definite and undeniable. One feels taken in, assimilated, completely absorbed into Being. We can summarize the process thus:

1. It is the personality of ego, and its identification systems, that is absorbed.

2. It is absorbed into Being.

3. The result of the process of absorption is a new integration, the Personal Essence.

In the advanced stages of the journey of inner realization, many experiences involve this process of absorption. Such experiences, as far as we can tell, do not occur at the initial stages; if they do, the steps are not so clear and definite. They require the capacity to drop all defenses of ego, the capacity to recognize Being and the capacity to distinguish it from ego states. 

To use religious terminology, we can work on understanding the soul, or we can work on understanding God, or the supreme being. To understand the nature of everything is to understand what the supreme being is, the nature of God, or the universal spirit. And when I use the terms “God,” “divine being,” or “supreme being” here, I don’t mean an entity that lives in some heaven, that creates things in time and sends emissaries to reward or punish us or anything like that. If we think of it in that way, we’re still looking from the viewpoint of the individual soul. In the boundless dimensions there are no separate entities, human or divine. 

In exploring the boundless dimension of divine love, for the most part we’ve been taking the mystical approach to self-realization. So we know this is one side of our work: we explore our experience in our soul, we find what is our true nature, and this true nature becomes our very identity. We are, then, essential nature; we are divine love; we are the supreme being. But there is then another side to our work: to bring that true nature into the world as a human being. And that’s the side we call personalization. It happens in our work with all the aspects, and in all he dimensions. With each aspect, first you experience it and realize it in your own soul, and then the challenge is how to embody it in the world. And as you continue to work on recognizing your identifications, you go through the empty shell, which leads to self-realization when you fully recognize that true nature is what you are. And then this other process happens, where that true nature becomes personalized as you embody it in the world as a human being. So these two facets—self-realization and personalization—occur on all levels of our work, on the personal level and on each of the boundless dimensions. The personalization process is part of what we call actualization of realization.   

These four virtues indicate what qualities we need in order to live a genuine human life, a life that can lead us to the deepest truth. If we have love and respect for Being, sincerity and earnestness about reality and truth, if we have delicacy and refinement, and if we are helpful and generous, then the major obstacles that block the perception of oneness are removed. When I say that the truth is our oneness, or that there is no separateness, I am not saying that when you realize this truth, you will disappear as an individual. You might take oneness to be a loss of who you are; you might fear that you are going to disappear. The condition of oneness can either be the sense that you are the oneness, the undivided Supreme Being, or that you are a unique individual who is inseparable from the Supreme oneness. Your individuality remains, but you as an individual are part of the totality. You realize you are a cell in a bigger body, that your body is a cell in a bigger body. It is not that your body will be erased, nor that you as a unique human being will disappear. No, you remain a unique human being, but that unique human being is an expression of the oneness, is supported by the oneness, and is part of the oneness, one cell in the larger cosmic body. So you are not less and you are not more than anyone or anything because everything is of the same nature. You cannot be more and you cannot be less