Now we can use this understanding to see what happens when one experiences Being, as in the state of the Personal Essence. The experience of the Personal Essence feels like a sense of autonomy, independence, individuation and so on. However, since one still identifies with ego, or reverts to this identification, one believes that such autonomy is more separation than one can handle. One feels that his distance from mother, emotionally, is becoming bigger, and this is felt as a threat to his sense of identity, as a pressure on his level of integration. And if the individual still has unresolved conflicts about separation, dating back to the first few years of life, then these will be activated by the pressure of the essential experience. 

Love in some sense is very strong. It melts your heart despite all the defenses you’ve accumulated. That's quite a power. But it’s a different kind of strength; it’s a feminine strength—the strength of yielding, the strength of receptivity, the strength of melting, the strength of softness.  The direct experience of love is that it does not feel like strength—but it does not feel like weakness either. It just feels like an appreciation, a lovingness, a happiness. But the situation is, as we have discussed, that people associate love with weakness because of its connection to babyhood and with the traditional image of femininity. This softness is part of the phenomenology of many forms of love, but not all of them. Here we are discussing the pink love, which is a personal love or liking that is characterized by softness and tenderness. When I feel cute, I don't feel weak. In fact, the stronger I get, the cuter I am. That's how it works. Being strong doesn't mean that you can't be cute and fluffy. In fact, because you're strong, you can afford to be cute and soft and tender; that’s because you know that you can take care of yourself.  

There is a sense that all my apparent knowledge of the world, primarily ideas and stories in the mind, is peeling away, leaving something unknown underneath. There is mystery all around me. I feel a profound sense of ignorance. I wonder about life and death, about the life of the body, about everything that I have thought naively and arrogantly that I know. I realize that all life, and all objects and processes in life, are full of mystery. I do not really know anything The not knowing is not threatening. I accept it with a sense of wonder and bafflement. The center of the operation of the nous, at the forehead, feels like an open window, transparent and clear. In this openness the activity of the nous is so intense that it feels like a continuous series of explosions. The contemplation, which is bursting with insights, acts on the mind like dynamite, shattering its long-held complacency about its knowledge of the world. At such moments it seems that the perception sets aside the knowledge of the mind and apprehends things nakedly. The chair now looks like the usual chair I have known, except that this is only the external appearance, which I am now acutely aware of as merely appearance. Everything else, the walls and the doors, the floor and the carpets, the lamps and books, all seem to be appearances, surfaces of something much more fundamental, external facades of a more basic reality. I perceive the chair and everything else around me becoming transparent, as if the shapes and colors have become so luminous that they have lost all opaqueness. And through this transparency, naked reality peers through.

However, this practice of surrendering to and abiding in the true manifestation of the logos does not feel to the soul like an attempt to cooperate with the logos in order for the latter to take her to the condition of an ultimate state of enlightenment. This would simply be a manipulation, not a genuine surrender. It feels more like being real and authentic, or like a respect and appreciation for the truth that happens to be one’s experience of oneself. It specifically feels like being oneself, for oneself is whatever the logos manifests it to be. We simply feel authentic, while the form of authenticity can be any form or dimension of the presence of true nature. 

This is part of the mystery of true nature, which appears as the ultimate mystery of the absolute. Experientially we recognize both pure awareness and the absolute as nonconceptual. Yet they are phenomenologically different. They differ as day differs from night. Pure nonconceptual awareness is clear, colorless, transparent light that feels like the coemergence of presence and absence. We see a vast expansive space, clear and colorless, bright and limpid. It is a space full of light, just like space in daylight. Yet, it is also a presence with the sense of solidity and fullness. In experiencing the absolute, we perceive a transparent and clear space, but dark, so dark it is absolutely black. The blackness is not a color, but the absence of light. In other words, nonconceptual awareness possesses light while the absolute is ontologically prior to light. They are both transcendent to being and nonbeing, but they differ in their relation to light. We can say that the absolute is the mystery prior to light, but at the same time the source of light. The first light that manifests in it is the nonconceptual light, pure awareness. In other words, both are empty of ultimate existence, but the absolute is much more empty. It is even empty of light, awareness, and hence can be experienced as cessation. Looking into pure awareness we see transparent and light-filled space, pervading all manifest forms, and constituting them. Looking into the absolute we first see darkness, but if we focus on it completely, our awareness spontaneously turns around and we find ourselves witnessing manifestation. We see the manifestation as possessing a ground of pure nonconceptual awareness, but this ground now appears as a manifestation within the absolute. 

A second related factor is that shutting down the flow of one’s essential nature often involves actual blocks in the flow of physical energy in the body. Awareness of these blocks might feel like contraction, denseness or deadness —“my heart feels like a stone; my legs feel like wood; my head feels like a bowling ball”—or even complete opacity to our experience which can manifest as an inability to sense a certain part of the body at all—“I have no legs; my heart is numb; my head is blank.” On a third, more subtle level, the block may be not so much in the flow of physical energy (which is of course never complete; blood flows, nerves function), but in the availability of parts of the body to awareness, or in the availability of the experience of essential presence in the body. Like a physical injury, the cutting or blocking of the flow of presence in the body causes pain, which is defended against in the normal course of conditioning, but the process of uncovering self-identity structures necessarily penetrates those defenses, and thus makes available the sense of pain resulting from what one can almost literally call a tear in the being of the self. We usually experience embarrassment and shame when we begin to feel a narcissistic wound. Narcissistic hurt is a doorway to the insight that there is nothing to our conventional sense of self, that it is fake. We may feel ashamed of ourselves, deficient, worthless, not good enough, “found out” in our unreality. We might feel unimportant and worthless because we are empty of anything real and precious. Naturally, we defend against this wound. 

The narcissistic wound that arises has all the characteristics of the wound of alienation from the Essential Identity, but feels more profound and has other differentiating characteristics. The wound feels like a deep hurt, a very teary sadness, but we do not generally experience this sadness and hurt as differentiated from the deficient emptiness. We feel an emptiness permeated with sadness, a vast nothingness that pervades the whole world. This nothingness is pregnant with hurt. There is hurt, a sense of wounding, a sadness, but also a compassionate warmth that pervades the emptiness. Thus, when we experience the narcissistic wound at this level of narcissism, it is indistinguishable from narcissistic emptiness. It is as if the wound opens up and pervades the emptiness, inviting the quality of loving kindness, which we experience now as boundless and infinite. This allows the sadness to become deep and profound, as if the wound goes through the depth of the universe. We feel as if tears drown all of reality. The wound feels like a very deep and boundless emptiness, filled with tears and pervaded by compassion. These phenomena hint at the specific properties of the true self which is about to manifest, but also show that the narcissistic wound at this level is the same as the chasm that separates the self from this dimension of Being. 

Logically it’s easy to see, but experientially it’s a little difficult. Whatever sensation or whatever feeling you’re experiencing, just realize that is what is here at this very second. Forget what it has to do with, in terms of causes and time and all that. Just perceive it as it is. If you’re uncomfortable, there is discomfort. That’s it. There’s a sensation of sorts that feels like discomfort. It doesn’t matter why there’s discomfort. If there is discomfort, just stay with the discomfort. Let your mind go. Don’t listen to the sounds in your mind telling you it’s because of this and that, urging you to react. No, just stay with it. If it’s discomfort, it’s discomfort. If it’s ease, it’s ease. And you could go even beyond the discomfort and notice the actual sensation that you call discomfort, or you call ease, or you call one thing or another. Stay with the bare consciousness, the bare sensation of whatever it is you’re experiencing, without reflecting on it. Whatever you think, however you feel, emerges as instantaneously as the bare sensation. So don’t get trapped by the thought or emotion or sensation. And if you realize that you get trapped by it, you realize that this too emerges as spontaneously as everything else. Your awareness becomes instantaneous. As things emerge, you spot them. The moment the thought emerges, you spot it. The moment the feeling emerges, you spot it. The emergence and the spotting are one thing. The flow and the awareness of the flow happen at once. If you see things as they emerge, you see their source. So you don’t need to control anything. You only need to be aware of what’s happening. Aware without trying to figure out what you’re aware of. When you hear noises, you don’t think of their source, you only hear the noise. Life becomes an awareness of the flow of the pattern. 

The realization of both the Personal Essence and the Cosmic Consciousness now make it possible to see through the projection of the representational world. The continued experience of the Personal Essence and the Cosmic Consciousness begins to expose a contraction in the psychophysical organism that has been very deeply hidden. One slowly starts realizing that this disharmonious contraction has to do with focus on, or cathexis of, physical reality in general, and not just on one’s own body. Understanding this exposes the self-concept again as an empty shell. However, now the empty shell feels like an individual who is emotionally and mentally trapped by the physical world. Sometimes one feels as if he is fat, or full of fat that covers a deep emptiness. One becomes aware that this sense of being a fat empty shell is coexistent with a state of greed and lust for food and physical comfort and pleasure. One realizes the consequences of the exclusive cathexis of physical reality, which is basically how ego sees the world. One relates to the world as if it can fill one’s emptiness, can satisfy one’s greed for all kinds of physical rewards. One is deeply, though unconsciously, aware of one’s deficient emptiness, and is seeing the world as the source of gratifications. 

If the soul is a field of consciousness, a medium aware of itself, then how is perceiving this different from our normal experience of being conscious of our inner experience? In other words, how is pure consciousness different from the normal subjective consciousness, which also feels like a field of sensitivity? The primary difference between ordinary inner experience and direct knowing of consciousness is that when we discern the inner field that is the soul, we experience it as a presence, independent from and more fundamental than all the content of consciousness and all characteristics of subjective experience. When we recognize pure consciousness, then, what we become aware of is the presence of consciousness, its existence, its ontological truth. We are contrasting the recognition of presence with awareness of the objects of consciousness as well as with awareness of consciousness as activity or process. Experience of pure consciousness is awareness of the thereness, the isness, of consciousness. Consciousness is fundamentally presence, presence conscious of its own presence. The presence, the hereness, the beingness of consciousness, is not something extra to consciousness; neither is consciousness an extra property of this presence. This is one of the primary discoveries in the inner journey: presence is always consciousness, and pure consciousness is always presence. 

States such as envy, hatred, and anger have classically been called the passions—emotional states that are so intense that we become identified with them. But this is not the passionate love we're talking about. The passion we’re looking at here is an essential aspect that is a fullness, a presence—a presence that is love. Passionate love is a sweetness, as all essential love is, but its sweetness is different from that of the pink love, or the merging love, or the divine love. Here we're experiencing a fullness that fills the heart, a fluid density that feels like love but has an intensity to it. The other types of love don't have that intensity unless you mix them with shakti. But passionate love doesn't need shakti; it is already intense because that is its quality. Shakti would only make it more ecstatic. So passionate love is a fullness and an intense sweetness, but not intense in the sense that it's too sweet; it’s intense with a sweet tartness. The taste is what you experience when you eat a pomegranate or drink pomegranate juice. That’s why I call passionate love the pomegranate love. It's fluid, like a nectar, so the presence is of a dense liquid, sweet and tart and very pleasurable. If you have ever seen or tasted thick pomegranate syrup, you know that it’s a very dark red. Passionate love is actually a mixture of red and black, made into one quality. It has the strength and power of the red and the black qualities of essence, but it also has a zesty type of sweetness. So, passionate love is the most delicious, the most exciting love possible, but it's not gentle, not delicate. It's powerful, it's strong, it's fiery.  Perhaps the most interesting thing is that in passionate love, we experience an intensity of appreciation and passion, and it also feels like desire. It's a passionate, intense desire, but it is not a needy desire. It's a wanting, a loving wanting, but not a needy wanting. You’re not sad or melancholic, you're just hot for it. The world can't contain you. You're bursting with excitement, but the excitement has an ecstatic quality. Whatever you love, you love to death. 

The obsidian arises in the morning meditation, but it is partially obscured. I experience it as a shiny black rock over the heart area. Awareness continues, a global holding of all content of experience. The presence of the nous feels like a gentle tingling filling the forehead. At some point, awareness discerns anxiety under the black rock, and some concern about my motivation being misunderstood. I recognize the concern is in anticipation of a public lecture I am scheduled to deliver at night. I am not used to giving public lectures, or holding public events. The anxiety and concern create a physical contraction that turns the blackness into a rock. It is like an obsidian diamond in the rough. Curiosity arises about the concern regarding motivation. However, investigating my intentions in giving the lecture, I realize I have no motivation. The spontaneous inquiry, which is an expression of the presence of the nous, reveals that my mind does not accept that I have no motivation regarding this event. So it projects some misunderstanding onto others. By afternoon I find my awareness inside the state of the black rock. It is a rock no more, but a radiant black crystalline nothingness, that feels like the very essence of the state of peace. Contemplating the mysterious peaceful emptiness I feel a complete aloneness, a total disengagement from everybody and everything. As the black faceted presence I experience no concern in relation to anyone or any idea. I am a truth-consciousness, a presence totally independent from and transcendent to any relation to anything. I am the presence of total freedom from having to respond to anyone. Inner object relations are entirely absent, bringing a sense of complete freedom from all external relationships.

We return to our example of working through the issues regarding the strength essence to illustrate the structural level of issues that expose the barriers to the soul’s liberation. As the soul begins to be open to her aggression and anger, and allows herself to feel strong, she may encounter new difficulties. Now she finds new and deeper barriers to experiencing the essential quality of strength, even though she can be somewhat open to anger and aggression. Continuing her exploration, the soul becomes aware of a sense of weakness, which actually feels like an identification with weakness that the soul is not able to transcend. Further inquiry reveals an image of being a weak person that has become part of the soul’s identity. This identification is not a matter of repression; rather, it is character and structure. Inquiring into this image, the soul may find that as a child she disowned her strength not only because of fear of others’ anger, but because if she had felt strong she would have felt able to stand up to her mother, and even to be separate from her. This insight might reveal conflicts around separation from her mother, a separation that is appropriate at a certain stage of ego development. 

Two of the many manifestations of Being—two major essential aspects—are associated with the parents. If we look at our formative experience in childhood, we can see why. In the first few months and years of life the infant’s primary relationship is a dyadic one, mostly with the mother. This insight is now generally accepted in depth psychology, especially after Margaret Mahler’s research, which culminated in her theory of separation and individuation. As a natural continuation of the bond formed during pregnancy, the early relationship of the child is primarily with the mother. The mother’s intimate physical relationship with the child is expressed through the whole nurturing process and represents the central element of maternal care. The maternal functions are directly related to the essential aspect of the Merging Essence, which therefore becomes the primary aspect associated with the mother. Merging Essence is a kind of love that has a relaxing, merging, and melting quality. It is a heart manifestation in the sense that it feels like love, contentment, nourishment, softness, and warmth. Thus, the longing for mother often reflects a disconnection from the Merging Essence. But that maternal relationship doesn’t mean that the father is not needed or that he does not have a place or function. He is needed as a presence of strength and support that makes the relationship between the child and mother comfortable and optimal, or at least possible. Ideally, the father acts as a protective and supportive umbrella over and around the mother and child. He is experienced as a presence that contains both mother and child. His presence gives that primary mother-child relationship a sense of security, a sense of protection that allows the two to be involved in their early interaction without having to worry about the rest of the world. 

Then the student’s perception may expand to reveal that the totality of the personality, with all its thoughts, feelings, hopes, desires, and so on, is a part of a larger whole. It is an inseparable part of a universal network that includes all of his life, involving every person he has any relation to. It feels like a heavy network of images, representations, affects, and thoughts that pervades all his life, comprising an interconnected totality. It is a heavy, dark, and complicated network. He is now experiencing the totality of his self-structure, seeing that it includes everything and everyone his mind remembers and thinks about. He experiences the totality of his personality as outside of him, separate from his pure being, but now as a continuity of a personal history. He can see that the totality of his personality is not only continuous with all of the situations of his life, but also continuous with all of his past history. He sees that it is part of the continuity of this totality as a dynamic network of psychic structures. If the experience continues to expand, the student recognizes that the network that comprises the totality of his personality is actually not separate from the totalities of all the people he knows and has known, and they in turn are connected to others, and so on. It becomes clear that his total personality is a part of a universal network that includes all of humanity, like a psychic network covering all the earth. This universal network includes all of human knowledge. Parts of the network are darker than others, with some brightness here and there. But it is generally dull and dark, heavy and complicated, in contrast to the simplicity, purity, and lightness of being the Essential Identity. 

And yet what characterizes the actual nature of Brilliancy is its direct presence in the soul, which then manifests in the thoughts and actions of that person in the world. In the experience of the presence of Brilliancy, I experience myself not as a body with thoughts and feelings but as a palpable presence, as the very presence of some brilliantly luminous fluid. I am usually in touch with the body and its feelings and thoughts, but I am aware of myself as a sensitive fluid that pervades the body, and which feels deeper and more fundamental than the muscles and bones. And this palpable fluid, which is not really physical—even though it has texture and density like physical matter—feels like the presence of inner luminosity, like condensed brilliant light. This fluid light is so pristine, so immaculate, so true and absolutely uncreated or contaminated by mind or memory, that it has the distinct sense of being totally pure. The palpable fluid feels like the presence of purity itself. Brilliance and purity are two characteristics of the same fluid, just as pure water is both transparent and wet. We cannot separate the transparency and wetness in water, just as we cannot separate brilliance and purity in Brilliancy. The presence of purity affects the mind and the totality of consciousness by cleansing them of past experience, of all memory and past knowing. So I feel myself not only as presence that is purity, but also as presence that is virginal, open, and totally sensitive. I recognize this experience to be the prototype of innocence. I am innocence present as pure brilliance, where the purity is the same as innocence. It is like the innocence of an infant—totally open and present, with no mental baggage or premeditation. But this innocence is the presence itself, just as an infant is too innocent to know that she is innocence itself. It is so innocent that it is pure innocence. 

Reality is always realizing itself, always living itself, always manifesting itself in one way or another. Reality can manifest itself as you in a dual experience with the world, and it can also reveal to itself the worldview—what we call the ego view or the dualistic view—that underlies the ego’s experience of the world. We can think of the ego view as deluded—and it is deluded. Nonetheless, that is one way that reality shows itself. Reality sometimes presents itself by deluding itself in a certain way. It can also reveal other possibilities by liberating itself from those delusions and showing itself without those delusions. We could call those other possibilities realization and enlightenment. By liberating itself from those delusions, reality begins to reveal the ground, the underlying nature of all these manifestations. Seeing the fixations and unfreezing them, thawing them, and melting them can begin to reveal their nature and ground as transcendent, as pure luminosity, clarity, and emptiness. For some time now, that is how we have been working in the school. We have been looking at this thawing, this melting, this liberation, and experiencing the opening of this realm of time and space. But, in a subtle way, we continue to see this process from the perspective of the individual self, from the view with which we began. From this view, the process feels like a progression or development, seems like a liberation from one condition and the arising of a freer condition. What is truly difficult is to see reality or experience reality from its own perspective, totally free from the view of the individual self.  

I have encountered this shell every time my identity has been challenged by a new manifestation of Being. It indicates the identity of the ego-self, formed by memory and history. In this state I feel phony, not authentically myself. At these junctures the process usually begins with the recognition of being identified with an ego structure, with the attendant shame and deep hurt. This understanding gradually dissolves the shell, and fully reveals the emptiness. The emptiness feels like a state of not knowing myself, of not having a sense of self or identity. Holding this deficient emptiness with motiveless global awareness, allows it to transform to a peaceful black spaciousness. This space, which has no sense of self, and no concern for its absence, allows the new identity to arise. The new identity is usually a certain dimension of Being, which now takes the center of experience. Something different occurs in the experience I am relating, again reminding me never to become smug about what I know, even when it arises from authentic experience. I have learned not to anticipate what will arise, for there is no way to second-guess the action of Being. 

In other words, real time is the life of the soul, the unfoldment of the soul. Each period of it is a period of growth and development, not just a temporal space in which events take place. In fact, it is possible to see in this experience that a person’s true maturity, the real measure of the soul’s actualization of her potential, depends on the length of the period this person lives the unfolding flow of the soul. This is because this life is a life of steady unfoldment, a ceaseless manifestation of potential. Real time does not necessarily feel like expanded time, or slow time, or anything like that. The flow can be slow or fast, but it’s more like full time, rich time. We are really living, and not a second is wasted, but is completely and fully metabolized. Every minute is fulfilled, so time is completely there; all time is there in the experience of the soul. The flow of the presence of consciousness itself feels like time. The sensation of a rate of flow changes, in the sense that experience is going faster or slower. But the flow is always happening, and it does not really make sense to give it velocity. It is more like fullness of time, intensity of time. 

It is clear to my understanding that the ordinary knowledge of the world, the knowledge put together by memory and thought, veils the luminosity of appearances, and makes the various forms appear opaque. This opaqueness obstructs the perception of the underlying reality of the forms, by eliminating their inherent transparency. Thus the world is solidified into something inert and dismembered. And when the opaqueness is dispersed, through understanding its sources, perception beholds shapes and colors that reveal a reality so pure, so fresh, so new and undefiled that consciousness is totally transported, as if seared from within by a cool Arctic wind. I see through everything, through the surfaces of the various forms, and behold what underlies everything, what fundamentally constitutes all. I penetrate to the center of the universe, to the real nature of existence. What I behold baffles the mind, shatters it and enchants it beyond all knowing: The universe is one infinite perfect crystal, totally transparent, and absolutely clear. A density and immensity beyond comprehension, a solidity infinitely more fundamental than physical matter. The reality of the world is a solid transparency, a compact emptiness so clear it feels like the total absence of any sensation. This sheer clarity, this solid void, is so empty of mind and concept that it feels exhiliratingly fresh, so uncorrupted that it strikes me as the very essence of innocence. It is the virgin reality, before mind arises, before thought knows, before memory is born. 

The fifth major characteristic of true nature is that it is not only awareness, oneness, dynamism, and openness, but also knowingness. This is similar to the Buddhist notion of the “wisdom of discrimination,” or the discriminating awareness of the Buddha. It is inherent to essential presence that it is not only awareness of presence but simultaneously the discrimination of the particular quality of presence, such as Compassion or Peace. This knowingness is inherent to presence, inherent to the awareness of presence. It is not that presence arises and a separate awareness knows it as Compassion. In fact, sometimes a quality arises that you are not familiar with, but the presence itself tells you what it is. Many people, for instance, do not know there is such a thing as the presence of Value. But if they pay attention when it arises, they recognize, “Oh yeah, this feels like value. I feel worthy, I have worth.” So presence has in it—intrinsic to it—knowingness. At the beginning of the inner journey, we usually experience Essence in one of three ways: as a presence that arises inside us, or that appears outside us, or that comes into us from the outside. These forms of experience, though real, are due to limitations in our perception, and can become veils if taken to be final. These experiences can be seen as an intermediate stage between normal experience and the objective experience of reality. When we experience true nature objectively, without veils, we recognize that it is neither inside nor outside. It’s everywhere—outside, inside, and in between. The field of awareness has no boundaries. This presence is an infinite field of awareness, which means that true nature is not the true nature of the human soul only, but the true nature of everything. True nature is nothing but presence, which is at the same time awareness, oneness, and knowingness. 

What I mean is that true nature doesn’t have only one way of presenting itself. You can experience it as a crystal or a stone, which is how the alchemists talked about it. And you can experience this stone as either outside of you or inside of you. When outside of you as the ground that contains you, the stone seems to be the magical divine hermaphrodite—creating all possibilities—that carries the secrets of all existence. Inside you, the stone feels like you awakened to yourself. But true nature can also manifest as warm compassion—tenderness that affects you, impacts you in such a way that you are aware of other people and feel inclined to do what you can to be of service. It can manifest compassion with an emerald-green hue or with no color at all. True nature can expand, appearing as compassion of the heart or compassion that pervades everything. True nature can also appear as a diamond-like form in the center of your forehead that allows you to perceive and understand everything clearly and precisely. Or true nature can appear along your spine as a platinum column that supports you to be yourself. And true nature can even appear as an apple in the hand of a Zen Master.