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. Understanding our experience is knowing what it is, directly feeling it, and having insight into that feeling, all as part of the immediate experience. Because it is a reflection, an emanation, or a particularization of the Divine Mind, the Diamond Guidance has the capacity to reveal our experience, to penetrate its obscurations all the way to clarity and truth. I call the Diamond Guidance a vehicle of real knowledge because its specific capacity is to make it possible for the soul to know herself. And if you know yourself, then you know your source, because this source is your ultimate identity. The totality of the soul is a microcosm of all of reality, the unity of Being. The Diamond Guidance is a microcosm of the characteristic of the knowingness of God, the macrocosm of reality.

In this dimension we behold all manifest reality as an emanation from the absolute. Everything is a radiance emanating from the still silence of the absolute. Everything emanates from the mystery, for everything is nothing but the variegated and beautiful radiance of the absolute. This is one of the objective relations of the absolute to its creation. Everything is an emanation from the absolute, hence the absolute completely transcends all manifestation. The absolute in this dimension is supremely transcendent to all its manifestations, including its qualities and vehicles.

To see oneself as the emanating source of all manifestation can lead us to recognize that we are also the subject of all perception. This insight is the specific experience of the self-realization of the absolute dimension. We are the emanating source, and from this place of source we witness all of manifestation arising as emanation. The glimmering is not only the emanation of manifest reality, but also and simultaneously the light of awareness of the absolute. In the very act of emanation the absolute perceives. The self-realization of the absolute dimension is not simply the experience of emanation and the simultaneous witnessing of emanation, but also the recognition that one is the absolute that witnesses the manifestation. We are the subject, and all emanated manifest reality is the object of our perception. The sense of subject is the recognition that the absolute is none other than I. Here the absolute is Self, the inner nature and identity of all Reality. We recognize that we are the mystery at the heart of everything.

Hence each essential quality is a faceted diamond, a wisdom presence, a synthesis of the presence of quality and the timeless wisdom of this quality. Each is a differentiated perfection of the absolute: precise, clear, and objective. The sense of presence is exquisite and transporting, gentle, subtle, delicate, smooth, and absolutely light. We feel our presence as the utmost of refinement and subtlety, combined with a delicate and gentle precision. We feel our insides both smooth and totally open, both exquisitely fine and amazingly sharp. This delicious, blissful state is both awake and peaceful, clear and completely still. It is the absolute itself differentiating its own perfections through the minimum of emanation. This minimum of emanation imbues each diamond with a very subtle sense of its quality: the compassion diamond has a subtle and delicate warmth; the love diamond a fine and exquisite sweetness; the strength diamond a precise and still vitality; and so on. And all are but differentiations of the mysterious vastness of the absolute.

The love which is the first emanation from the supreme reality is Christ love, or boundless love. It is like a boundless heart, a heart with no barriers, no boundaries, no defenses. Heart with no boundaries at all is boundless love. There are no boundaries at all, no barriers at all, no defenses at all. So you are completely vulnerable. This is why love, completely divine, universal Christ love brings the greatest vulnerability: when you experience it, you are at the maximum of vulnerability before you feel yourself as invulnerable. You have to open yourself to that level before you can be invulnerable. And you can’t do it by saying, “I’m doing this so I will become invulnerable.” That very thought is a barrier. You have to be vulnerable with no defenses, without even the thought of a defense. One way I see our situation is that creation or the universe is like a tree. Love is the flowers of the tree, and the human being is the final fruit of the tree, the final fruit of creation. The thick nectar of the ripe fruit is gratitude. Gratitude for how things are, gratitude for being vulnerable, gratitude that you can be completely influenceable. Gratitude for being human.