We can experience Being in any of its boundless dimensions, each dimension revealing an aspect of its timeless truth and providing a necessary ground for experience and life. So the experience of this alive consciousness at the level of Living Daylight is that the universe is pervaded by love, that it is love, and that everything within it is an expression of love. It is the experience of the universe as an expression of intrinsic goodness or positivity. For human beings, good means loving. If someone wishes you well or feels positively about you, we say that that person likes and loves you, and so we call this quality love. The universe is experienced here as fundamentally loving, functioning universally in such a way that life unfolds in a positive way, functioning personally in such a way that you become more of what you can be—fulfilling your destiny.

The Work must be done according to your own inquiry; the Work that we do here is only a guidance. Your motivation has to be pure, real and true; your flame has to be there; otherwise you’ll use the Work for the wrong purpose. You’ll get somewhere according to an idea, but it is not necessarily where your Being would take you without constraint. You can develop this and that, become free from this and that, but how do you know whether that will fulfill your destiny? You might think you’re supposed to be more loving, or less afraid, or more comfortable, or more relaxed, or richer, or more beautiful. Maybe you are, maybe not. These are just ideas. But true questioning, sincere questioning doesn’t have a particular goal. If you think you have a goal, an end, and if you think you’re going to go there, you’ve already extinguished the flame. If you’ve told yourself you’re here because you want to be enlightened, you want to be free, you want to be loving, you want to be this or that, that means that you already know. But you don’t know, really. It’s a lie to believe that you know. It’s true that there’s a question and that you don’t know the answer—that is the truth. The most honest answer you can give to the question “Why am I here?” is that I am here because I don’t know. The truest reason for you to be here is to fan that flame of inquiry.

As we have already discussed, in many spiritual traditions, desire is considered negative because it is seen as an ego desire, which is a desire based on our animalistic impulses, our need to survive. Generally, it is recommended that you not feel desires, that you push them aside or just witness them, and continue staying focused on the practice rather than attend to the content. This is suggested so that you don’t get distracted by feelings, thoughts, and memories that can bring up a lot of inner conflict. As you see, there is a great deal of difficulty in just allowing the feeling itself. But the truth is that once we allow the feeling, we can understand it and allow it to fulfill its destiny. We have to learn how to do this in a way that optimizes our spiritual realization. Even so, we need to understand that not all desire is the same. For most individuals, desire and grasping onto the object of desire are the same thing. Desire that is related to attachment is suffering, and it keeps us dissociated from our nature; this type of desire has mostly to do with the self and its object of desire, not with the desiring itself. But as we have seen, desire can function as an avenue to our nature—if we can use the desiring energy that is usually directed outward, thereby creating attachment, to go inward. It takes a determination and a love for the truth to stay with that energy and follow it back to its origin, thereby liberating the energy of desire to serve freedom instead of keeping us bound in suffering.

Our vulnerability is not the only characteristic of being human, but it is a uniquely human characteristic. It means that we’re influenceable, impressionable, and open. Many other creatures are by their very constitutions defended. That’s why I mentioned an alligator. An alligator doesn’t feel emotional hurt, right? It doesn’t feel that it loves someone, then gets rejected and feels hurt and abandoned. As far as we know, by its very nature, it’s defended, because it doesn’t have the capacity to feel. Through our capacity to think and to know, to know our nature and our destiny, we’re vulnerable to all kinds of feelings—fears, conflicts, and the like. If you see this situation clearly, you’ll observe that you’re actually terrified of this vulnerability, and that in most circumstances you avoid it. You probably see it as meekness, weakness, dependence. But however you see it, it remains the most uniquely human characteristic.

Since the logos is the harmonious flow of all phenomena, a flow that embodies an optimizing and loving intelligence, it is the source of wisdom regarding many of these phenomena that are of particular interest to human beings. Being the harmonious flow of interrelating phenomena, the logos contains the wisdom of their optimization. It can show us the truth and reality and the possible optimizing direction, of such things as human relationships in their various forms, such as love relationships, marriages and divorces, friendships and work associations. It can reveal to us the wisdom regarding destiny, connection, union, even the various degrees of union with God. It can also reveal to us the wisdom of how to grow, develop, mature, evolve, and so on, and how to unfold knowledge and deepen heart. Because it is the harmonious order of all phenomena, it can guide us toward optimization of all concerns of human life, and of life in general. It can also provide us with a more complete understanding of the self, and support our realization that there is no self-existing and abiding entity called self, for everything is continually created new.

Sometimes when people try to do this Work and believe it is not working, it is often the case that they have been searching for something, or trying to get rid of something, and it has not worked. They have been doing everything but working on understanding themselves and their situation. This activity of seeking and trying to change things is nothing but moving undigested food around; pushing it around doesn’t help digestion, so it cannot lead to transformation. Understanding requires that you are deeply present, really there. You simply are, your beingness is in intimate contact with whatever arises, whether it be thoughts, perceptions, feelings, or contact with your situation. From this conjunction of life experience and Being arises the functional aspect of Being, the mature human individual, what we call the Personal Essence. Understanding is a process by which the human being, or Personal Essence, develops and matures. Of course, we could go into all kinds of details about the process of understanding—what stops it, and so on. But from the beginning, we need to see that understanding is not a matter of searching, hoping, desiring, or going after anything. It is a matter of being here, now, in your very experience, and coming in direct, undefended contact with your experience. It is a natural process of development and unfoldment if you don’t resist it; it is what is supposed to happen to a human being anyway. That is our potential and our destiny.

One must be sensitive to the direction and promptings that the universal logos is unfolding within one's experience. It is the universal logos that unfolds our experience, and if we listen to its guidance and intimation we may discern which way it is taking us. In other words, the universal logos is the force that directs our destiny, including which path to follow. We need to discover the direction its optimizing intelligence wants to take us, which is the same as finding and following our destiny. The path we follow is, in some very deep way, not a personal choice, but a destiny. That is why a genuine teacher does not recruit or try to enlist students, but simply follows the unfolding of the logos, accepting what it does in terms of which students to bring into the teaching and which it sends away.