When I am my True Nature as a being of light, I am like a field, a presence, an effulgence. This doesn’t mean that I am like the steady bright light we experience coming from the sun. Our True Nature is not just a medium of light, a transparent, luminous presence. It is magical light—light that continues to be a light but is always changing. It changes its color, its shape, its density, its texture. It can actually take on the forms of emotions, thoughts, images, and sensations. This light that I am is always forming itself into one thing or another. And this forming itself into one thing or another I recognize as the various experiences that I have. If the light is sometimes a white light and sometimes a green light, we might think this means that first it was white and then it became green and therefore some time must have passed. But if we are in the light, if we are the light, the change from white to green is not from the past to the future. Transformation does not occur in a progression from the past to the present to the future, which is how we usually think of it and experience it. The change, instead, is more of an outflow: The forms just appear, they arise out of nowhere. The source of our experience is not the past as our mind understands it, but some mysterious immediacy of the moment. So the movement is from no form to the presence of form, from nothing to something, and it is instantaneous. Our eyes see a constancy of forms, but our actual experience is of an ever-fresh arising of those forms in an unfolding now. And perceived changes are simply the patterns in the outflowing of the forms. 

And pure energy does not judge itself. It just is. It is a pure expression of something that is innately yours. It is your life force. It is your life energy, and it brings life, a dynamic effulgence, to your love so that the love and the energy become one. The dancing together is so intimate and complete that there is no difference between the love and the energy. So we need to suspend our ideas about what can come forward. We need to not judge our needs, because it is necessary to explore everything in our experience. Even though it can be painful, it is important to allow the neediness that is mixed with desire to come into consciousness. That’s because the desire, in and of itself, is a way back—back to our energetic heart, back to that erotic, alive, and full energy waiting to burst out with the joy and exuberance of life and love and desire as one. We are getting close here to what we mean by divine eros. 

The fourth insight is that this unfoldment is the Holy Work of God or of Being or spirit. This Work is what is called “creation,” or sometimes “new creation,” in the sense that the world is created minute-by-minute, like the fountain of water in our metaphor. The water that pours from the fountain in one moment is not the same water that pours from it in the next. The creation is new in the sense that it is renewed every second. This moment is not the product of the last moment, but is completely new and fresh. So there is an emerging, flowing effulgence of Being, an arising manifestation of Being. This flow is nothing less than the very transformation and evolution of the universe, including everything contained within it. This Holy Work can be perceived and understood only when you are in the present, directly experiencing it. You have to perceive the presence to perceive the Holy Work. It is happening all the time, but we don’t normally see it as Holy Work. When we are not perceiving the universe as an unfoldment of presence, we see it as governed by cause and effect, as a matter of physics and chemistry. When we are completely in the now, and know ourselves as part of it, we see the universe as an unfoldment of nowness, of presence, of pure reality. Holy Will, the Holy Idea of Point Two, is the force implicit in this unfoldment, while Holy Work is the action of unfoldment itself.

Another transitional experience that can move us toward an expanded view of reality is experiencing the soul as an effulgence, a flow. When you experience this fully, you might see that you cannot separate your soul from your body; they are one thing. Seeing this, you can experience the whole of your body as a flow that is continually renewing itself. You perceive, then, that your body is being recreated in every instant. As these types of experiences deepen over time, and the sense of boundaries dissolves, you being to see that what you have experienced within yourself is happening all around you. Then you recognize that there are not experiences, but peeks or glimpses of what is happening all the time. Having this kind of perception reveals Holy Hope. When you recognize through your helplessness that you are not the mover, that you are not really making things happen, things begin to happen in a different way. When you realize that you don’t have to do it all, there is a sense of release and relief, and you can allow things to unfold by themselves. 

As the soul comes to this understanding, her boundaries may begin to merge with the divine effulgence. She becomes part of the ocean, a big drop of the ocean. The drop is a dense liquid honey, or amber nectar, as if the ocean of light liquefies at the location of her body as a big wonderful drop of grace. She sees and feels herself surrounded by grace. Her essence feels like an inseparable part of the ocean, but denser than the rest. As this development began she was afraid of losing her experience; she sees now that the outcome is a more clear and free essential realization. She now sees the way out of the dilemma of boundaries: actual merging with the divine and losing the sense of individual experience. Essence becomes clearer, more lucid, and very graceful. The soul becomes a drop of grace, of full and substantial presence, but utterly free and fulfilled. A great deal of understanding may unveil at this juncture, especially if the diamond guidance has already been integrated and now functions on the dimension of divine love. Its graceful presence attains a soft and divine quality; its faceted diamonds become more fluid and softly glowing. The boundless love is not like someone loving something. It is more of a full and rich presence, softly and delicately textured, with a heavenly affect, sweet but wonderful, uplifting but totally pure and selfless. It bathes all forms, infusing everything with the most sublime love, and blessing appearance with the garb of divinity. 

This simple stillness full of graceful clarity, in its depth and silence, is gently and effortlessly manifesting everything in a process of effulgence and light. The enlightened view includes the process of manifestation, includes this constant effulgence that creates all the things in the world from the void, that materializes each thing from nothing. In that sense, reality is a wizard. Out of complete nothingness appears all that we perceive and experience. And it’s as simple and as easy as dreaming something. When you dream, you create a whole universe that feels like solid matter; people get hurt and various things happen, but it’s really not taking any effort. You are completely asleep, completely resting, and it is all happening. It is the same with Quintessence; it is completely still and silent, and at the same time it is unfolding everything with effortless ease and spontaneity. Recognizing the spontaneous happening of reality, we see the pulsing creativity that instantly manifests the entire world that we see from moment to moment. The world emerges, appears, disappears, emerges newly, appears, disappears—all instantly, all constantly. We can see this in our own experience. Our experience is always a creative emergence of various forms of feelings, thoughts, and sensations constantly changing. In the complete view, our experience, the outer world—everything, including our body—is constantly generated, created, and formed. Only when we see this dynamic creativity do we understand movement and action and change. Each form, including us, is created newly and differently each instant; these slight differences, when seen through the continuum of time, appear as movement—just as the still frames of a movie projected quickly, one after the other, give the sense of movement and change when actually it’s instant-to-instant creation.