Universal love is an expression of the harmony of the totality. Everything is in harmony with everything else. Nothing is excluded. Your will is in harmony with your compassion. Your compassion is in harmony with your joy. Your joy is in harmony with your anger. Your anger is in harmony with your body. Your body is in harmony with your ego. Your ego is in harmony with other people. There is no conflict anywhere. Everything fits and functions as a togetherness, as a oneness.

That oneness is you.

That oneness is the true feeling of who you are. You are not the personality, or any particular aspect of essence. You are the whole thing, including emptiness and space, and you experience everything in complete harmony. When this happens, there is a sense of intimacy, an exquisite, personal intimacy, the feeling that you are you, with nothing excluded, nothing rejected. You also feel that you are both a person and a universal existence, that what is personal and what is universal are completely harmonious and can coexist. When your whole organism is in harmony on all its levels, there is no conflict. The expression and radiance of that harmony is love. You become a channel of love, a manifestation of love. You feel completely yourself and not separate from anything. It is possible to be you, completely you and not separate from the other at the same time. This is the action of love. The action of love is to unite, to reveal the connectedness. A loving person doesn’t love you—a loving person is love. Love isn’t given. It overflows. It’s not even your love—it’s everyone’s love interacting. Love emanates from us like the scent from a rose.

You need to see what you project onto the Work and what relationship that projection resembles. Any time you doubt the Work, object to some of its principles, or rebel against some of its regulations, and you identify with such attitudes, you are actually not benefiting from the Work. The channel is being closed by your actions. In the old times, it was said that you were not fit for the Work in such cases and didn’t deserve it. I think that kind of judgment comes from the superego. It is better to say that your attitude is closing the door to your connection to Essence. When you make the effort to understand your reactions to what happens here, you will always find an underlying unconscious issue, some kind of resistance. Sometimes it is hard to learn from these observations. Although you might have experienced them a thousand times, you identify with the emotions each time as if you didn’t know better. Every time you identify with your reactions, it’s as if you go to sleep. 

According to the Diamond Approach, the barriers of the personality to the merging love aspect (and to all others), these dark spots and knots that clog the flow of energies, are nothing but certain specific mental and emotional contents relating to the loss of the essential aspect and the subsequent attempts at compensation. In other words, the dark spots are areas of darkness in our personality: certain emotions, memories, and ideas that are cut off from consciousness and repressed. What the yogis see is the repressed unconscious content, but they understand it only energetically and not psychologically. In our approach, we use psychodynamic understanding to see through these dark spots and dissolve them. The spots are dark because they are repressed material; the light of awareness and understanding does not reach them. So we open each knot, and shed the light of awareness on its content. This will bring out to consciousness the relevant repressed memories and affects. The discharge, the actual experiencing and understanding of this content, usually dissolves the dark spots. In this way we go on dissolving one barrier after another until the whole channel is clean. There is no need here for the extreme caution that the yogis require because we can shed light on and open any dark spot that confronts us. We don't need to go around or avoid anything. This method is a direct confrontation with the personality, understanding any part of it that comes within the field of our awareness. 

So the eyes can truly reveal your heart; that is why it is said that the eyes are the windows of the soul. But the eyes are actually the windows of the heart of the soul. And for the heart to be connected to the eyes, the love has come through into them. Thus the issue about allowing love to show particularly arises in relation to the eyes.  We are seeing here that when love is released and freely expressed, the heart becomes directly connected with the eyes—the eyes become a direct channel for the transmission of love. We all know how powerful a look is. Just one look can communicate a lot. You communicate how you feel, your attitude, your desires . . .  many things. So the eyes have to be connected to the heart for a person to communicate. And remember, we have seen that love is the ground of all feeling, of all emotions. So one of the barriers, one of the veils in relation to love, is whatever makes us not want our love to show or to be seen. If we don’t want our love to be recognized, then of course we wouldn’t want it to show in our face—so we are not going to let it come through our eyes. “God knows what kinds of things people will be thinking of me if they see that my eyes are smiling and notice that I am feeling soft inside.” As we’ve seen, that’s when the issues about needing to be hard, tough, strong, and masculine tend to arise. We want to learn how to allow our eyes to smile. And that means understanding what it takes to connect the eyes with the heart, as well as the specific reasons why we don’t want our love to express itself, especially through the eyes. As in the example above, you might not want your love to be seen because you think you will be judged as too soft or too weak. But there are deeper issues, barriers, that make it difficult to express your love. And these relate to the fear that if you show love through your eyes, you will feel the hurt, the deep wound, of your love not having been seen in the past. So we are dealing here with a narcissistic issue about love, a narcissistic wound from the time when we were children showing our love freely. 

The correct relationship to the teaching is not a matter of blind obedience, although it was called “obedience to the teaching” in the old times. Ultimately, it is a willing obedience to the teaching and to your essence. It is obedience with an understanding of why a relationship of obedience is the one that works best. That understanding happens by understanding your unconscious. Learning to have the correct relationship to the teaching means learning how to be receptive, learning how to be a clear and unimpeded channel for the teaching. This clears the channel for your connection to your essence. The unconscious is what stands in the way. By attempting to understand and actualize this relationship, you will confront all the parts of your unconscious—the feelings, opinions, prejudices, sensations, whatever patterns you have. These issues are to be looked at with disidentification. One way of looking at this process is that you need to understand your unconscious and your conflicts enough to be open so you can receive from the teaching. However, that is not the most accurate understanding of it. Working to understand the unconscious and the personal conflicts that are barriers against openness is, itself, the receiving. That is the giving, and that is the receiving. It is not that you work so that you will receive. The very work you do is the giving you do, and it is what you receive. The work itself is the process of transformation. The Work arranges situations in order to make that process happen. I don’t mean that you are not receiving something besides the actual work you are doing. If you are connected to the Work, you are automatically receiving both in ways that you are aware of and ways you are not aware of. That is happening all the time. Your work makes the flow more steady. The nourishment is there; the substance of the teaching is present and available to you at all times. Your work can catalyze a certain alchemical reaction, the result of which will be the crystallization of certain substances that are your essence. 

If there is something arising from within you that is natural and spontaneous and deep, that is not seeking. Your being can flow in a certain direction, and be acting, without it being ego activity. Ego activity is split from being. Being does not function according to what your mind says: “You shouldn’t do this, you shouldn’t do that. This is good or this is bad.” That position of judging how things should be leads to seeking and searching. On the other hand, sometimes your energy, your own being, flows in a certain channel in a spontaneous, effortless flow. In this flow there is no seeking. A great deal of knowledge and understanding can arise out of such authentic activity, and become integrated as true understanding. This is why two people can read a book and understand it at different levels of depth. The difference is not that one is smarter, but that he is really into it—the impulse towards the understanding comes from his heart. It is not because he is going to know more or become more successful.  

Understanding, then, includes the mind becoming an expression or a channel for Being. Mind becomes connected to Being, not separate from it like it was when you were a child, or like it was when you were an adult just seeing your issues. At this level understanding becomes the unity, the interface, the meeting of Being and mind. You are Being, but there is also awareness of the beingness. This consciousness of beingness is understanding. So, then you might say that you understand yourself. But this is not a description of who you are. It’s not the understanding. Understanding is not “I am such and such. I am joy.” A statement is not understanding. Understanding is the actual embodiment of the state, the insightful beingness of it. Understanding is the unity of Being and insight. Understanding love, then, doesn’t mean knowing love is this or that, love is good, love is sweet, love affects you in this warm way, love nourishes you. Understanding love is to be love in the moment, to feel what it’s like. If you understand this completely, which means that you are completely and totally love, with a discriminating consciousness of the state, understanding automatically moves the state to a deeper level. The moment there is completeness in that state, the insight is there—insight is the union of your mind and your Being at that moment. This is love. And you always know it, though sometimes you may not be able to say what it is. The moment this happens, there is no compulsion to continue experiencing yourself as love; only if it is objectively needed will it arise. The next thing just arises. This is the unfoldment.  

The more you get in touch with the helplessness, the more you might also get in touch with a specific physical blockage against it, which is the same thing as holding on to the delusion of vanity, of separate doership. This blockage is a specific holding at the anterior fontanel (at the front of the head) which blocks the channel of Living Daylight. When we see through this delusion and surrender our striving and our belief in it, this channel opens up. Then we can experience the beginning of real holding, the beginning of blessing as a descent of light that is love. This loving light expresses the action of Being as it melts the rigidities and fixations of the soul. When this occurs, we see that vanity is the specific blockage against the channel of Living Daylight, because in believing in yourself as a separate doer, you are taking God’s place. In other words, vanity and striving are reflections of the position that one does not need real holding. You feel that you can do it on your own and so you don’t need nourishment—whether human or divine. It also means that you believe that you do not need grace, and therefore block it. Grace is the descent of Living Daylight, specifically in regard to dissolving boundaries, so it allows us to be held by the universe and to trust in it. When you connect with this level of reality, the degree of holding in the environment ceases to be an issue. The environment that allows us to dissolve is Being itself, and when we connect with that dimension of reality, we feel held no matter what situation we are in. 

Our openness to the presentations of our soul gives Being the space and freedom to creatively unfold, revealing its hidden possibilities. If left to its own resources, Being will spontaneously unfold in a creative way, revealing whatever is inherent in it. This creative unfoldment is a natural property of our Being. This means that if you don’t put limitations on your Being or try to channel or restrict it, it will of its own accord be creative in presenting to our openness whatever possibilities reside in it as potential. What is revealed might be suppressed painful memories from the past, or newer capacities and skills, or even new dimensions of experience. Since it is inherent to our Being that it is dynamic and tends to optimize our experience, it makes sense that what is needed is the openness to the unfoldment that occurs as the result of our inquiry. Openness implies a trust in the inherent intelligence and lovingness of this dynamism: “I trust that my Being will move the way that is best for it to move, so why should I interfere? This allows me to be really open to it.” The openness becomes an invitation. The optimizing thrust of Being can become bogged down, however, and then we get stuck in a cyclic repetition, a repetition compulsion of old patterns and stale impressions. This is the fixed and rigid inertia of conventional experience. 

As long as you believe you are a separate person with boundaries, with the attitude of getting things and protecting your self, you will block love. Love destroys boundaries. Love has nothing to do with you or me. Love is just the activity of that creativity in that openness. Love is the outcome of non-restriction, of freedom. When the body and the mind are not restricted by that point of view, the harmony of the body and the mind will be expressed in a lovingness, an abundance. The natural movement of our being is to be in love. The expression of that freedom is love, goodness, sweetness, contentment. When there is no point of view, there is complete and real love. When love is present, there is no movement toward getting or protecting. Your body exists as a channel for that flow of love. Love will flow by itself. The openness and the love flowing through it will allow everything to happen the best way it can happen. In this state of love, there is no sense of getting or keeping or even giving. There is no you and someone else. No islands. There’s love and an emptiness, a whole universe. You are nothing but an individual expression of that love. When you see that you have a point of view and allow it to relax, let your mind relax, love will emerge spontaneously and you will see that you are not separate, you will experience directly that we are all individual expressions of the same thing, different parts of the same thing, of a unity and a wholeness. On the most basic level, that is how things really are. There is no separateness. The separateness is a belief you have which keeps you cut off from the natural outflow of love.  

When you recognize your ego ideal and also recognize the essential aspect in it, what I call your particular “channel” opens. Your channel has levels of the essential quality which you don’t recognize immediately; these levels manifest as part of a process. For instance, if a person idealizes strength, there are many qualities in the strength. Ultimately, it becomes the “red channel,” which manifests as strength and power, and then as a sense of vitality and expansion. This develops into a lustiness, and as the red energy expands, it becomes passionate love. Passion is idealized. As this expands, there is an idealization of beauty. The red channel is the channel of beauty. You’re not only powerful and expansive, you see and appreciate beauty—a glamorous kind of beauty—a beauty full of vitality and colors. When you recognize the ego ideal, instead of having something to accomplish, you then have a special contribution that is an outflow of who you are. This can happen only by exposing the ego ideal, not by living according to it.