The orientation toward living the truth that we know connects us with another Diamond Dimension, called the Citadel. Like the Diamond Guidance, this manifestation of Being possesses specialized functions that can be used in personal development and life in general. As an integrated expression of our true nature, the Citadel functions as a unit—a Diamond Vehicle—where all the aspects of Essence appear as a structure that functions in a unified manner. While the Diamond Guidance guides the soul’s inner unfoldment toward true nature, the Citadel is a vehicle of understanding and guidance for living a life in the world that is aligned with the truth. Its presence provides a specific support for how to live our life, how to relate to our situation, and how to conduct our affairs according to the wisdom of our true nature. This ultimately means creating or arranging our environment to help us live the way we know truth to be. As the Citadel is realized, it provides the soul with all the essential aspects as specific supports for living a life of truth. We call it the Citadel because it can manifest as an enormous, solid presence—like a mighty fortress—that supports and protects the truth as it manifests in our life. The various defensive ego functions that have helped us operate without the ground of our true nature are replaced by this immense and powerful support of Being itself. The more we learn to bring our awareness of truth into the functioning of our life, the more we gain access to the essential grounding, guidance, and protection of the Citadel. 

The objective inner balance in the journey of the soul challenges her rigidity and fixation, exposing that at the apex of this tendency is her ego identity. It reveals how the unfoldment of the soul can move most optimally when it is balanced and not fixated, when there is a total flexibility in the inner forms that the soul can manifest and assume. This understanding challenges the ego identity, which normally requires rigid and fixed forms to recognize itself. The arising of the diamond dome exposes the ego identity as the primary issue for the state of essential balance, and hence as the central issue for the diamond dome. This diamond vehicle manifests here the wisdom of its various diamonds, revealing how each essential aspect can be a path toward ego death, the transcendence of the ego identity. (For detailed discussion of the ego identity see The Point of Existence, chapters 9 and 10.) Ego death refers here specifically to the soul’s experience of herself free from the identity structure that gives her the normal sense of self-recognition, particularly the egoic sense of having a center, or of the ego identity being the center of experience. Even without this center, she is still partly structured through ego development, but her center is now the peace and stillness of essential emptiness within which true nature presents its various qualities. We have discussed this process—as part of our discussion of the diamond dome—and its necessity for the development of the soul to embody the total pearl beyond price, the pearl that has personalized all essential aspects, representing the station of the complete person, in The Pearl Beyond Price, chapter 32. The diamond dome embodies the wisdom of the necessity of ego death for the free unfoldment of the soul, and provides knowledge of how essence works toward this death. It reveals that essence is inseparable from knowledge, and ushers the student into the perception that being Being and knowing Being are the same. 

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 of 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 an 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. The experience of the Diamond Guidance itself is that of a presence, an awareness inseparable from the sense of hereness. There is a subtlety and a refinement in this presence, a purity and a gentleness. It is both full and delicate, with a gracefulness to the delicacy, a flowing ease that is inseparable from a peaceful quietness. 

The relationship of the soul to the macrocosm, and specifically to its absolute essence, becomes clearly delineated by the advent of a new diamond vehicle that manifests as part of the journey of descent, the freedom vehicle. It clarifies where lies the true freedom of the soul, and how this freedom is inseparable from the life of service. Among the many elements of the infinite wisdom inherent to this vehicle, one that is paramount to the soul in terms of her life and development, is the objective and precise wisdom regarding the soul’s role in the cosmic manifestation. What is important about it for our life on earth is that it contains the objective wisdom of what an individual being is in relation to the cosmos, and what his or her function is in actuality. The freedom vehicle clearly indicates this wisdom, which reveals our presence as a direct manifestation and extension of the absolute into cosmic manifestation. It is the absolute, nonlocal, and nonextended; yet it is a form localized in the world of time and space. It is a bridge between timelessness/spacelessness and time/space. It is itself beyond time and space, but protrudes into them, bringing through its emanations the richness inherent in the absolute. In realizing the freedom vehicle, we realize that each of us is an objective, precise instrument for the absolute. We exist as its eyes, its mouths, its ears, its arms, its legs, its genitals, its brains, its nervous systems, its mind, its intellect, its heart, and so forth. The complete and natural function of any of these organs, and hence of our bodies and souls, is to be an instrument of the absolute, allowing the absolute to behold and experience its own creation, its own display of its hidden treasures. To be fully ourselves is to faithfully serve the absolute, to purely and selflessly do its bidding. In serving it, in surrendering our wills completely to its dynamic will, we find our happiness and fulfillment. We cannot be happy by trying to fulfill our separate and self-centered wishes and desires, if they conflict with the natural outflow of the logos of true nature. Recognizing our selfishness and egotism, and understanding how these positions dissociate us from our true nature, allows us to align our wishes with the natural flow of Reality. First we need to align our identity with the absolute ipseity; but deeper still, we need to align our will with the will of the ipseity. 

Each diamond vehicle is associated with a presenting issue, whose resolution opens the soul in a particular way, correcting her orientation so that she can assume the necessary attitude and state for the descent of the particular vehicle. The issue for the Markabah is the pleasure principle, and in general the external orientation that dominates the ego-self. Because the soul is structured in a way that dissociates her from her essential nature, in the normal course of ego development the soul becomes predominantly an animal soul with a civilized veneer. She inherits from the animal soul its external orientation, which is reinforced by the early dependency of the human infant, as we discussed in chapters 10 and 11. The soul is powerfully driven by the animal instincts, dominated by the need for gratification. Gratification is the pleasurable satisfaction of her desires, whether they are for safety and security, company and intimacy, sexual and physical pleasure, or for anything else she craves. Structured thus, the soul grows up adhering to two deep delusions: that the purpose of life is the gratification of her desires; and that the objects of gratification exist outside her in the physical world. She becomes enmeshed in a life of seeking instinctual gratification, ruled by the pleasure principle, which is seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. The love of truth, which the soul has learned in the course of her inner journey and through which she has invited the assistance of the diamond guidance, comes up against this basic human orientation. The soul recognizes that to continue to love truth selflessly requires a huge shift in her view of life and her orientation in living it. She sees that truth must come before pleasure, and that she must look inward for what she needs.  

A particular diamond vehicle appears and functions as a steppingstone toward the journey of descent. We refer to this diamond vehicle as the point diamond, which is basically the appearance of presence in the form of a faceted diamond, except that its center is occupied by the point of essence, the essential identity. The faceted diamond can assume any of the qualities or colors of the essential aspects, but with the point of light and presence always at its center. The point diamond vehicle continues the process of self- realization of essential presence, which is begun by the integration of the essential identity of essence. The integration of essential identity gives the soul the capacity for the experience of self-realization, the ability to be and recognize herself as the presence of true nature itself. The point diamond is the clear and precise recognition and understanding of oneself as the essential presence. It is conscious and discriminated self-realization, being essential presence inseparable from knowing it as one’s nature. The wisdom of this diamond vehicle is the recognition and appreciation of one’s uniqueness, and unique realization. But this manifests specifically as the recognition and appreciation of where one is. In other words, to authentically be oneself is to abide in what the logos’s dynamism of Being happens to be manifesting as one’s identity at the moment. This is because Being is always and constantly manifesting all of appearance, including the form and presence of the soul. Therefore, one’s authentic and real truth at each moment is what the logos manifests it as. Therefore, to be true to the dynamic intelligence of the logos the soul only needs to recognize this manifestation and abide in it. The soul does not need to do anything to get anywhere; she does not need to direct her experience toward any particular end, whether it is the absolute or whatever. She cannot determine her own manifestation because it is the logos’s dynamism that actually determines any experience and form. 

Exploration reveals that the concept of experience has been unconsciously fused with that of being an individual entity, that the soul believes she has to be an individual self for her to have experience at all. The realization of boundlessness reveals the delusional character of this conviction, as it sweetly melts away the ego boundaries that give her the sense of entitiness. A subset of this is the concern about not having her own experience, because she believes experience can only be her own. This fear is not exactly the loss of “I,” but of “my.” This possessive tendency turns out to be a distorted expression of the need to have personal uniqueness and autonomy. This reflects a lack of objective understanding of the personal essence, the true individuation of the soul. This understanding is provided by the stupa diamond vehicle, which challenges the soul’s deep belief that in order for her to feel her personal autonomy and uniqueness she needs the separating boundaries of ego. Furthermore, the stupa unveils the timeless wisdom that personal autonomy and uniqueness are characteristics of the personal essence, which does not require boundaries or in fact any ego structure. The soul can be personal, unique, and individuated when necessary, as one of the possibilities of true nature. In other words, because the boundless love is a dimension of her true nature, it is not antithetical to her personal attributes; in fact such attributes are part of its potential.