The way of poverty is for us to be so empty, not possessing anything, that the Ultimate Truth, the inner Beloved will find us worthy of beholding it. The inner Beloved is a jealous beloved. It won’t show itself unless there are no other lovers in our heart. When our heart is completely empty, then will it reveal itself as the mystery underlying all of reality. And the way to such inner emptiness is that of poverty, specifically the poverty of spirit. Remember what Jesus said. You need to give up not only your clothes, money, furniture, books, lovers, ideas, prestige, accomplishments, achievements, creativity, ego, and mind, but your spirit itself. Poor in spirit means you haven’t got spirit, just like poor in money means you haven’t got money. What does it mean not to have spirit? We are working here on essential realization, learning how to connect with essence, reality, spirit, soul—and now we have to give it up. You may think this guy Jesus expects a lot. You may think he was talking to poor people who didn’t have much to give up materially, so they had to give up something else. I think he is talking to everybody. The attitude of possessiveness, the attitude of havingness, is a central attitude of ego. You are somebody who has things. Can you imagine yourself being somebody who doesn’t have anything? Not having in this context means not having to have. It’s the willingness to be poor. It’s not a matter of becoming poor, although that might happen too. If that is what it takes for you to experience that you don’t have to have, then maybe you should not have possessions. So the easiest things to give up, to be detached from, and not to care about are the physical things—clothes, money, and so on. What is more difficult to give up is the inner domain. To be poor within means to give up your thoughts, feelings, wants, desires, likes, dislikes, preferences, opinions, beliefs, ideas. Being poor within is not holding positions about what is good and what is bad. If you do that, then you still have preferences, you still are not completely poor. From this perspective we see that everyone is very rich. We are all rich in spirit—full of ideas, preferences, opinions, beliefs, goals, and ideals.

Everybody has some sexual energy—some people more than others. Engagement in sexual pleasure is part of a normal and natural encounter for those who are in a couple relationship. Some of you may have chosen not to be sexual or aren’t in a relationship, so you feel erotic energy only with the inner beloved. Erotic energy exists within us as life energy and is simply a part of what and who we are, regardless of the ways it may or may not be expressed. And divine eros is a potential of that energy that is heartful, alive, and sensual. Erotic energy can become a force that animates our spiritual experiences and spiritual lives. We can live in the world with eros as part of the being that we are when our erotic energy is freely manifesting in many areas of our experience. In effusive ways, expansive ways—but also in small and in the most delicate of ways—our life energy can express and fortify our developing consciousness in any of its qualities and dimensions. Just being who we are, whether we are in a very intimate relationship with one person or intimately involved in our friendships, we have companions on the path, on the journey with us. The beautiful thing about human beings is that we can face each other and have the kind of connection that echoes the connection with our inner nature. We are a species that can consciously know ourselves and engage in relationship as two sides of the same thing in a way that allows our inner world, our inner universe, to touch and to blend with another universe. The possibility of two consciousnesses creating an inimitable configuration while remaining authentically themselves is part of an intelligent creative potential for us. To be two as one field, grounded in the deep vastness of eternity, is a special and wonderful possibility.

Many teachings say not to care about the world. Some say that enjoyment of the world, particularly the enjoyment of the body, is sinful, is bad, because it takes us away from the divine. For these traditions, “divine” means forgetting about the world; we just want God, we only want the inner Beloved —only the truth, only realization. But if we move exclusively toward the spiritual and think, “Let’s renounce the world and let go of everything,” we end up with half of real life. The extreme expression of that is to go into a monastery and forget about the world. On the other hand, if we emphasize the world and our relationships in it at the expense of spiritual depth, spiritual truth, then after a while even the most beautiful intimate relationship begins to be empty and meaningless and will create more suffering. In fact, as we move through the inner journey, we feel a pull, a movement, a love, toward the spiritual pole, which makes us feel that we are going away from the world and from the people in the world. This will bring up our attachment and, underlying that, the love of the world and beings of the world and things of the world. But, again, just to be in the spiritual and forget the world will feel to most people not completely satisfying, regardless of how blissful their spiritual experience. Even the experience of the spiritual ground—when we get to our spiritual home and are living in that intimacy—is beautiful, but at some point, it feels like something is not right, not complete. And we begin to be aware that “Yes, I love the spirit—but I also love the world.” Whenever we emphasize one part at the expense of the other, we begin to feel a state of incompleteness.

In Love Unveiled, we have seen how three particular qualities of love—personal, merging and passionate—provide the fuel for the inner journey. Personal or pink love is the appreciation of the beauty that we see in another’s unique individual expression of reality. Merging gold love is the delicious melting of the ideas of separateness that exist between two souls, or between us and our own source, revealing their inseparability. Passionate love is the intense desire to lose our separateness through dissolving completely into the other or into the inner Beloved. These qualities are not separate from each other, just as love itself is not separate from Being. Love might be called the heart of Being and these qualities are some of the colors and flavors of that heart. And although they are not separate, the particular characteristics of each aspect reflect the various forms in which Being manifests love as an invitation to surrender our idea of separateness. The heart of Being is so generous it offers many ways for us to let go of the illusion of our separate ego.

Here we have focused on three qualities of love but they are only the central ones that fuel the soul’s inner journey. Other flavors of love include joy, loving kindness, gratitude, and fulfillment. Each of these aspects carries its own unique affect and taste of our natural state of being—our true nature that is undivided and inseparable from the rest of reality. Every love quality opens the heart from the inside, bringing with it both a vulnerability and a sweetness. That sweetness reflects the pleasure of tasting our own natural beingness—being at one with what we truly are and recognizing that our efforts to protect ourselves cut us off from the experience of being real. These qualities also reveal the richness of the spiritual realm, and its enchanting beauty. The heart of Being expresses itself in so many beautiful and meaningful qualities, which is why we have adopted the title “Diamond Heart” for many of my books, and for some of the structures of the teaching. The heart is like a faceted gem that glows with the sweetness of its many flavors.

As I followed the destiny of that path—which eventually revealed itself as the path of the Diamond Approach—this unconscious force became more conscious and more powerful as my soul gradually became clarified. So it was only much later in life, when my soul had been clarified to the point where I could explore and fully be the diamond guidance, that I could know and understand what had happened briefly and spontaneously in that out of the body experience. At this later point, when my soul had become completely transparent—even empty of existence—especially around the heart, the heart then became a window through which I could clearly view the inner beloved, the nirvanic luminous black vastness.  And looking through this clear window of the heart, I could see that the radiant and luminous darkness of the absolute is in the midst of earthly existence, because it is actually the true nature of the world. So I was now seeing and experiencing in a more developed way what I had seen during the accident. While I was out of my body I’d seen the dazzling luminous darkness everywhere. It was the space I was in, and it was darker and more mysterious as I looked outwards. And yes, there was a love for that vast nirvanic darkness that I could have disappeared into, but there was also a love for human life, which brought out the love and joy of the diamond body I was experiencing as what I am. So the guidance simply took me back into the midst of life. I didn’t have to leave life to find the peaceful darkness of the absolute—I found it by returning to life and following the terrain of the path of this teaching. And the teaching tells us that the path is not to leave this world; it is to be in the world but not of it. It is a path of embodied transcendence. The experience had shown me briefly what I had been wanting all my life without even knowing it. From the very beginning, in some deep sense that was unnamed and unknown, I’d always known in my heart that I was distant from something. And as I saw it again now, the dazzling luminous vastness in the heart of my clarified soul, I recognized more fully and consciously what I’d been wanting and that I didn’t need to go somewhere else to find it—I was exactly where I ought to be. Here was where I recognized the source of all the blessing to be, the source of all the grace, all the luminous experiences, all the knowledge and all the guidance.