The Diamond Guidance, which is the dimension of Essence related to guidance and understanding, is a specific integration of all the essential aspects. All essential aspects exist in the Diamond Guidance, but differentiated. It is a structure of consciousness, which I call a Diamond Vehicle. It holds all the essential aspects, and each one is present in a differentiated and delineated way. So there is Strength, Joy, Compassion, Brilliancy, and so on, all present as themselves. They are, however, organized and integrated in a certain configuration and constitute a complete vehicle. They are all there functioning in unison, in harmony with each other. It is like a group of individuals who function in a harmonious way doing a specific work. One of the aspects can dominate and function while the others recede. Sometimes two of them are functioning while the rest have receded. But when Brilliancy functions, it functions in unity. It is one aspect.

The Diamond Guidance is a particular patterned structure of all of the various perfections, or essential aspects of Being. However, in contrast with the undifferentiated perfections of Brilliancy, the perfections of the Diamond Guidance all operate in a manifest, explicit, and differentiated way. They are explicitly differentiated, but they function together as one unit that activates understanding. This means that the Diamond Guidance itself is an expression of Brilliancy, of intelligence. It is the brilliant light which has been differentiated and then integrated in a specific function—that of understanding. This is one way of recognizing the functioning of intelligence in the Guidance, which has prompted us to sometimes refer to the Diamond Guidance as the discriminating intelligence of Being.

In inquiry, we learn how to open to the Diamond Guidance so that it will descend into our soul and guide her. This is something magical, really, in the sense that it is not part of our ordinary experience. And because integrated in it are all the colored diamonds, the Diamond Guidance makes it possible for the soul to understand all the aspects, their functions, and their effects on the soul. It is what reveals the meaning and understanding of each aspect, dimension, and manifestation of Being on all levels. It is this manifestation—the Diamond Guidance—that is the true, specific source of the Diamond Approach. As the source of revealed knowledge, Diamond Guidance arises in a way that doesn’t correspond with our rules of logic or the laws of cause and effect in our ordinary experience. Consequently, revealed knowledge cannot be proven in the conventional sense. The same is true of spiritual knowledge in general: It cannot be proven according to the standards of the conventional dimension. However, it can be proven in the spiritual dimension because the standards of proof at that level are different. When we try to logically prove to somebody who doesn’t know about the essential dimension that there is such a thing as the Red Essence, for instance, we are bound to fail. You can describe certain experiences associated with the Red Essence and the person may be inclined to feel that there is such a thing, but you cannot really prove that it exists.

This brings us back to the discerning and knowing capacity of presence itself—the higher intellect, essential nous, or what we call “diamond guidance”—which reveals that freedom has other meanings and other horizons. The thing that we need to understand about this discerning capacity is that it discriminates not only our knowledge and the content of our mind but also our direct experience. It discriminates the immediacy of what we are experiencing by discerning, seeing, and revealing what is there. It can extract the meaning and the implications of the experience, which in any experience of true nature are countless and varied. When I say “higher intellect” or “divine mind,” many people misunderstand and consider these to be mental faculties. But the heart is vital to this kind of creative discrimination. The functioning of this capacity actually happens through the unity of mind and heart because without love, there would be no compassion or sensitivity to the mind’s discernment. The creative discrimination of presence is activated by the participation of the heart. This discrimination arises according to true, deep, existential need and only when we have the right orientation—a loving desire to know the truth.

So the Diamond Guidance is the specific manifestation of the Divine Mind arising in our soul as a personal capacity. It is what gives our soul the ability to know exactly what is going on and to understand our experience.

Usually the Diamond Guidance operates as a presence in the center of the forehead. When it arises in support of discrimination and understanding, we become aware of an expansion as space opens up in the forehead. With that expansion comes a sense of peacefulness; the Black aspect at the center of the forehead opens and we feel stillness and spaciousness. When the Diamond Guidance arises in this peacefulness, we feel a delicate presence, a pulsating energy that possesses a sense of clarity and transparency, an intelligence, an illumination. This delicate, pulsing, breathing presence appears as understanding, as insight, as intuition. As the forehead opens, we feel the Diamond Guidance as a tingling, an energetic throbbing – but very soft, very delicate, very subtle. If we are not attuned, we might dismiss it as just a physical twitch. Or if there is a lot of blockage, as is often the case in the early stages of the development, the diamond might feel hard. Due to the blockage it can’t get through, so it feels almost like a rock. But if we are relaxed and open, we feel it as a softness, a delicacy.

The Diamond Guidance is one of Being’s greatest gifts to the human soul. When it descends into our consciousness, this living presence gives us access to the magnificent depth and richness of the spiritual life. It guides our journey of inner awakening. It reveals to us the true meaning of our experience. It aligns us with our potential for Clarity, Peace, Joy, and all the essential qualities of Being. And as we integrate this wisdom of the Diamond Guidance, we come to understand our true home in the larger unfolding of all creation.

The Diamond Guidance uses the mind, instead of the mind being in control, or in the foreground. It guides the mind, but it is actually the guide for the soul toward individuation and maturity, toward self-realization and the journey home. This is similar to the Sufi view that what is needed for the awakening and transformation of the soul is the “higher intellect” more than anything else. The Diamond Guidance provides the soul with the objective discriminating capacity that she needs to understand more and more deeply what reality is. This discrimination and understanding is not only the process of the work of inquiry, it is the nature of a true life. Inquiry can become the center of our entire life if our life becomes the unfoldment of our soul. If our life is not the continuing inquiry that is always engaging the unfoldment of the soul – if it is not an ongoing transformation – then we are stuck; in a deep sense, we are dead. We will be mired in inertia, repeating the same patterns forever.

As our understanding unfolds, the Diamond Guidance takes us from knowledge to mystery. The Guidance reveals to us the truth and richness of our Being, but the more it reveals these things, the more we are in touch with its mystery. This is a paradoxical, strange, and mysterious situation. Over time, the Guidance reveals to us more and more about our true nature, reality, and about what and who we are. However, the more knowledge and understanding we gain through this revelation, the more we approach the depth, the essence, of our Being, which is mystery. So the increasing and deepening insight and knowledge do not lead us to a satisfying conclusion about who and what we are. We don’t end up with a static picture of ourselves and reality. The more understanding and insight we have, the more our soul becomes transparent to the mystery, and the more we recognize that Being is mysterious.

The Diamond Guidance is the discriminating intelligence of the optimizing thrust, the guiding intelligence that specifically reveals through the recognition of what is being revealed. There is a dynamic interaction between this Guidance and love, an interaction related to the optimizing force of Being. Love is the energy of the dynamism that displays the truth, while Guidance is the magnifying lens of Being that helps us to recognize what is being displayed. Furthermore, the Guidance is the discriminating intelligence that opens the way for love to display the truth. The two things need to happen together for there to be a revelation …

When the Diamond Guidance arises, it is like experiencing the descent into stillness of a Diamond-like vehicle, so graceful and fine that you can only think of it as an angel or a divine emissary. Not that it looks like an angel with wings, but it has a sense of purity, of divinity, of a transporting quality of consciousness, otherworldly yet infusing this world with light and goodness. It is perhaps these qualities that have caused it to be perceived as an angel in the context of a different logos, such as Christianity. It actually looks more like a spaceship than what we call an angel. It is a latticed structure of myriad diamonds of pure consciousness. Each Diamond is a specific quality and color, and together they create one unified structure that sits on a round platform of pure solid silver, which then sits on a larger round platform of pure solid gold. Gold is the essential truth, and silver is the will of the truth, and together they function as the foundation for all the qualities that appear in Diamond form. This Diamond Vehicle can be of any size. It can descend and fill a whole room or a whole valley. It can be experienced as arising in the soul. Its mode of operation in inquiry can be experienced at the forehead as illumination, a pulsation, a tingling, a dancing of presence. But the Diamond Guidance may also descend into the heart or the belly. It can be very tiny or as big as a galaxy. Space doesn’t bound it. It is amazing that there is such a presence

This inherent discriminating knowingness of true nature encompasses the content of all that exists, all that can possibly exist, and all that has ever existed. While it transcends the experience of the human soul, it nevertheless appears within our ordinary individual consciousness in a specific essential form. More precisely, this knowingness, which is itself the knowledge of everything, manifests in the soul as the specific capacity of discrimination. In other words, the Divine Mind can manifest in the soul in miniature form – a microcosm of that macrocosm. We call this microcosm the Diamond Guidance. The label “Diamond Guidance” reflects the way this essential manifestation of true nature functions, as it reveals the inherent discrimination in experience. When this essential presence manifests in the soul, she can discriminate with the clarity, precision, and penetration of a Diamond what is actually present in her field of awareness.

The Diamond Guidance is an essential presence made out of diamonds, in which all the aspects combine together as one beautiful, colorful, luminous vehicle—not unlike a spaceship—in a precise, delineated form. And since each aspect manifests here as the understanding of the aspect itself, the structure that combines all of these diamonds into one presence operates as the vehicle for understanding in general. This vehicle then functions as guidance on the diamond level. This is a direct description, not a metaphor, of what the Diamond Guidance is. In inquiry, we learn how to open to the Diamond Guidance so that it will descend into our soul and guide her. This is something magical, really, in the sense that it is not part of our ordinary experience. And because integrated in it are all the colored diamonds, the Diamond Guidance makes it possible for the soul to understand all the aspects, their functions, and their effects on the soul. It is what reveals the meaning and understanding of each aspect, dimension, and manifestation of Being on all levels. It is this manifestation—the Diamond Guidance—that is the true, specific source of the Diamond Approach.

In other traditions, the Diamond Guidance is sometimes called the angel of revelation, the holy spirit that brings the word or message from the source. It is the angel that guides us to Beingness that is our ground, our nature, our source. It is the true friend, the total friend, because the Guidance’s only concern is for you as a soul to go back to your source, to be who and what you can be, with total acceptance, total support, total guidance, total kindness. The soul needs to place herself in the right attitude for this kind of blessing to come. You have to do the work of correctly orienting yourself. Basically this means harmonizing your consciousness with the mode of presence and operation of the Guidance. This is what we are exploring when we discuss inquiry – the right orientation, the right posture, the ways of being and functioning that will invite the Guidance.

When the Diamond Guidance is present, it gives us the capacity for precise, objective perception in terms of seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling, as well as emotional feeling and inner sensing. It affects our perceptual capacities in such a way that they become crisp and distinct, transparent, and free from the dullness of accumulated past knowledge. So it makes our perception clear and objective. The Diamond Guidance also enhances our capacity for articulation. The articulation of experience requires many capacities, one of which is the knowledge of words, syntax, and grammar. But we cannot articulate our experience if it is not first delineated and discriminated clearly in our awareness. If the structure of our experience is not clear to us, how are we going to articulate it, even if we know the right words and how to use them? If our experience is vague, our articulation is also going to be vague. So the Diamond Guidance not only brings a sharpness and precision to our experience, it also helps us to be precise and clear in our articulation, by imbuing our expression with its own properties: precision, sharpness, clarity, objectivity, and discrimination.

I sometimes call the Diamond Guidance the essential nous, the individual soul’s version of the universal nous of the Greeks, as described by Plotinus. In Sanskrit, the essential nous is referred to as prajna, while the discriminating awareness – the universal nous – is called jnana. It is known in both Buddhist and Hindu teachings that you use prajna to arrive at jnana. Prajna is referred as discriminating insight and jnana as inherent knowingness, or discriminating awareness. So Prajna is the recognition of patterns, understanding, insight, realization, while jnana is the inherent self-knowing of pure awareness. Jnana is not the experience of a specific insight or understanding; it is the recognition that all experience is knowledge and that you exist as knowingness, as knowledge.

When there is love of truth and true curiosity about it, it becomes possible to see the objective truth in the particular experience. Seeing the objective truth is the function of the Diamond Guidance. Thus, the sincere desire for truth for its own sake - love and curiosity about truth - is what precipitates the presence and functioning of the Diamond Guidance.

Each of the Diamond Vehicles is a particular combination of all the perfections. They appear in a certain pattern, in a certain juxtaposition that gives each of them a particular, intelligent function. So the Diamond Guidance is a particular patterned structure of the various perfections. Unlike the undifferentiated perfections of Brilliancy, however, the perfections of the Diamond Guidance all operate in a manifest, explicit, and differentiated way. They are explicitly differentiated, but they function together as one unit that activates understanding. This means that the Diamond Guidance itself is an expression of brilliance, of intelligence. It is the brilliant light that has been differentiated and then integrated in a specific function – that of understanding.

So discussing the various qualities and aspects independently does not mean that each one is separate and functions on its own. They all function as organs within the same organism—as an integrated whole. They might all function at the same moment, or alternate in various combinations. Guided inquiry has the capacity to use all the aspects in an integrated way to support us in discovering the various dimensions of experience. By revealing the truth, it has the capacity to penetrate all the levels of reality. If we follow it, the Guidance can lead us all the way to the source of all manifestations, the ultimate truth, which is our home. When we make the journey with the Diamond Guidance, the soul at some point becomes the Guidance itself apprehending the absolute nature of everything.

The Diamond Guidance is the vehicle that opens up our experience, and that opening begins our unfoldment, becomes the unfoldment, and is also an important aspect of the unfoldment. We can see this process, then, as having two sides—opening up and unfoldment. And when we see the complementary nature of this process, we call it “self-revelation.” Here we mean self-revelation in the sense that the soul reveals herself. But self-revelation is actually understanding, because understanding is the disclosing of the truth of what is arising. Thus, the whole process of opening up—which begins the unfoldment, continues as part of the unfoldment, and becomes self-revelation—is what we call understanding. In other words, the opening up, the unfoldment, and the self-revelation together are the understanding. So understanding means both the upwelling of new elements and divulging the significance of these elements. When the Diamond Guidance is operating without restrictions, understanding is the arising of new elements inseparable from the recognition of their meanings. When we say that unfoldment is guided, we mean that it is a deepening revelation of our human potential. We call it guided because it is going toward optimization. We are guided from being closed to being open, and always from a present manifestation to a deeper one. This guidance happens through the opening up of understanding. In other words, guidance is the facilitation of our natural unfoldment.