Student: What does having your own support mean in terms of Essence?

Almaas: It’s a dimension of Essence called the diamond will. It’s a deeper thing that has to do with the Hara and the lower belly more than anything else. The Hara is the support and at some point a certain realization, a certain aspect develops there. You feel a sense of solidity, sense of immensity, a sense of power and firmness that somehow supports you, supports your sense of self. Usually lack of support is experienced in the belly and the lower extremities. Some people feel that they don’t have legs or that their legs are weak or wobbly. Or the belly feels like jello. 

When you experience no support in the presence of someone like your teacher, it is easier to go through it. In time you can go through it by yourself because you already know you have gone through it many times. But even the idea that you can do it is a very slender thread, and it can break. For true self-realization you have to jump. You have to take the risk of jumping when there is no support, when you have no idea of what’s going to happen. It feels like jumping into an abyss. You don’t know whether you are going to come out of it or not, or whether you’ll be better or worse, or whether you’ll come out of it the same kind of person or not. You don’t know whether it will work or not. You have no idea. That is why a deep faith in reality, a basic trust in truth, can be very helpful at this point. When the hole is experienced completely, true support will arise. Basically, true support is resisted by the attempt to hold on, which is why the true support of Essence cannot be faked. It is very difficult to really let go; you cannot be lazy about it. You can experience all kinds of states without doing much work, but not true support. Even certain self-realizations can happen without much work, but to experience true support your work has to be real. 

To say that love is a beingness doesn’t mean anything to someone who doesn’t know what beingness is. Being is not an emotion. It does not even feel the way your body feels. Beingness means knowing that I am, that I exist as an is-ness, without reference to anything else. You know your body exists because you can feel it, see it, but that is not the way essence is. Essence exists not because you can feel it or see it. It is more intimate than that. The knowing of existence, the feeling of existence and the existence itself are all one thing. This category of experience is not available to the personality. To know an atom, you look in the microscope and see its shape and color. If you were to know the atom the way essence is known, you would need to be the atom itself and know what the atom feels like. There is no true knowing the atom by looking at it. As you can see, the beingness of essence is very far from emotional reactions, or something you give somebody. There is no somebody having something. The mode of knowingness, the mode of taste, of beingness and love doesn’t have that kind of separation, which as we have seen is the only mode in which the personality functions—there is me knowing something, me experiencing my body, me having an emotion, me having an idea. It is not that there is a me which has love; the love and the me are the same thing. I don’t mean that they are two things intertwined—I mean they are the same thing. It is not that this finger has this finger. They are so intertwined that I know I have love, but I am not separate from love. It is one finger, and the finger says, “I am.” 

Whenever you look at where you are during the second journey, you will find some quality of essential presence, which is very important for understanding the totality. You can never really understand the wholeness of your mandala without being aware of the essential presence and knowing what it feels like and how it affects you. Losing the thread in the second journey means losing the awareness of this essential presence. Maintaining the thread means that you’re always aware of your presence, whatever is going on. When issues come up, for example, dealing with them doesn’t mean that you leave essential presence and jump into the first journey; you can continue being aware of the essential presence as the issues and the feelings around them arise. This awareness gives you a much greater power and effectiveness in dealing with your issues than is possible in the first journey. This is because being centered in the essential center of the mandala makes all the issues look much smaller, and accompanying emotions and reactions are not so overwhelming. In contrast, during the first journey, you usually identify with one image or another—most of the time with an image of yourself as a child. When intense feelings arise, such as pain, it can be too much to stay with, and self-awareness is easily lost. Essential presence, on the other hand, doesn’t feel pain. There can be a great deal of pain, but essential presence makes the experience of pain secondary for the soul. So the totality of the mandala is always secondary to its center, which is essential presence. The contact with our true nature is essential presence, which in time becomes more powerful, more grounded, more solid, and pervades the mandala more and more as it moves toward the third journey. 

When a student is fighting the awareness of these states of weakness and lack of support, she often experiences physical tensions in the legs and back, and aches and pains in the lower joints: the hips, knees, and ankles. The resistance against these somatic manifestations of lack of support may lead to physical injuries to these joints, because of the awkwardness caused by physical tension and imbalance. These manifestations indicate that a person is somaticizing the sense of lack of support. As the student becomes more directly aware that he is feeling a lack of support, the felt sense becomes more definite and concrete. His legs may feel light and empty, insubstantial, even ghostly. This can progress to feeling the emptiness in the legs and the lower body as a definite sense of vacuity, as in the case of the hole in the belly that Penny felt. Only when the student accepts the feeling that he has no inner support does he finally recognize this lack as a specific emptiness, a state of deficient nothingness, which feels like a lack of support. 

In addition to having a texture and a taste, essential aspects have a smell as well; you can begin to smell the inner state. Some people say that they can smell fear. We do have a capacity to smell emotions. Not only can you smell fear, you can smell love. Love happens to have the smell of roses, or sometimes jasmine. If you smell the Green Essence, it smells like mint. You can smell freshness, you can smell staleness, you can smell rottenness, you can smell depression. You can taste, smell, and touch the quality of restraint, which is much like leather. You can do the same with the state of inertia, which feels like lead, or with the state of deadness in the soul, which feels like wood. As we see, all of these familiar ego states have textures, tastes, and smells just like external physical objects do. And different people have developed different capacities for sensing these states. Some people use mostly the inner touch. Some people can perceive taste easily but haven’t developed their sense of smell much; others develop smell to an unusual degree. But the development of a given subtle capacity has a direct relation to the corresponding physical capacity. 

Cosmic Consciousness has the following characteristics:

1. It is a presence. It is a very soft presence; gentle, delicate, smooth and flowing. One is like a wisp, like a delicate and soft cloud.
2. It is conscious. This presence is experienced as the very stuff of consciousness.
3. It feels like light itself, but more like the substance of light, not as rays of light, but as a flow of light, as an ocean of light. It is “light upon light.”
4. It is Love. This conscious substance of light is soft, gentle, tender and sweet. It is loving. It is as if one becomes an ocean of Love that is conscious. So one can call it conscious Love, or loving light. In traditional literature this is sometimes referred to as Universal Love or Christ Love. It is both Consciousness and Love in the same presence,
5. It is boundless. There is no sense of individual or personal boundaries in this aspect of Being. The conscious and loving presence is felt to pervade everything, to extend infinitely, as a homogeneous soft medium. It is not felt to be personal, in the sense that it does not belong to oneself. That is why it is sometimes referred to as universal consciousness. It is the consciousness of all beings. There are no boundaries here between individuals. That is why when a student experiences it he cannot help but feel one with everyone. And the oneness is felt in Love. One becomes full of Love and gratitude towards any being. One realizes he is not separate from the other. That he and the other are the same, are both of the same nature of conscious Love. 

Love is actually more than one aspect of essence. When love is first discovered, one often feels it as a certain sweetness, a sweet presence which feels fluffy and light. This is one of the simplest and easiest aspects of love to experience, love which feels fluffy and pink. Love is often experienced in this way in the beginning, as a sweet lightness, a softness and a gentleness that melts in you the way cotton candy melts. When someone says, “I love you,” it is often the fluffy pink love they are experiencing. It feels like liking. When you have discovered this loving aspect of essence, this sweetness, fluffiness and softness, you may begin to see the elements the ego attaches to love—need, wanting, desires and preferences. You may find that your personality lets you experience love only with certain people and only under certain conditions. This means that the love aspect of your beingness is connected to certain conditions from the past. Only under these conditions do you allow yourself to feel love. Men often won’t allow themselves to feel this kind of love because it doesn’t feel masculine. They feel soft, more like a woman, more feminine. Some men say, “I don’t want to feel this. This softness, this lightness is not manly.” This is a condition the culture puts on love, that only women should feel this way. However, it has nothing to do with men or women. This kind of love is an aspect of our essence. 

As we allow ourselves to experience that sense of separation and all the feelings associated with it, we will see that it is a specific hole, a particular type of emptiness, an absence that feels like a longing for something we love that we feel is missing. Longing always indicates both a separateness and a love. What is important to understand is that the state of separateness we are talking about here is a specific deficiency, a specific lack, which is the lack of the merged condition itself.  We can learn about it first, however, if we allow ourselves to stay with the lack of it, the state of absence, of separateness. Absence, or separation, is a state in which we feel empty, dry, isolated, alone, not nourished, cold. If we allow that state to happen without pushing it away, without reacting, without trying to get the merging by going toward one relationship or another or by seeking out this or that situation, then Being itself will manifest in the merged quality. If we allow that emptiness from the perspective of wanting to rend the veil and know the truth of what it is, we will see that our being will manifest itself in a specific quality. Essence itself will manifest as what we call the merging gold aspect. We will see why we use this terminology as we explore its experiential phenomenology. 

But if I think about it a little bit, I can see that where I am and how I am feeling are connected to my True Nature. The fact that I am feeling a meaningless emptiness reflects the fact that I have a True Nature and that I am distant from it. This is because True Nature has implicit in it a sense of significance. If I had no True Nature, there would be no way to feel a meaningless emptiness. Why is that? Usually, I take meaninglessness to indicate a loss of some external source of meaning that I have been accustomed to. However, if I pay attention to the experience of meaninglessness itself, I can recognize that it actually feels like a loss of contact with my own sense of significance. In other words, I implicitly know what meaning feels like in my soul and that feeling is missing. So as we inquire into where we are, experience the truth, and follow the thread of truth, that thread eventually will connect us with the truth of what we are. That is why truth brings more reality. Truth and reality are related; they are two sides of the same thing. The more we see the truth of where we are in the moment, the more we recognize something about the relationship between where we are and what we are. That recognition makes the distance between them shorter, and we feel more real. And that is why when we are real, we tend to see more of the truth of the situation; it works both ways. 

You can be identified with either side of this object relation, which is called the extension object relation, either as the extension of someone else, or as the central person with one or more extensions of your own. In either case, you are experiencing yourself as a mental construct in relation to a construct of someone else. This object relation is a narcissistic one (i.e., having to do with one’s identity), so losing it feels like a loss of support. This is because, regardless of which end of the object relation you are identified with, the identification supports the ego identity. You might feel as if you are losing yourself by experiencing yourself as an extension of the universe, since the boundaries that you have taken to define yourself fall away in that experience. Or if you have been identified as an extension, you might feel that you are losing yourself by experiencing yourself as central and yet interconnected. Like other narcissistic projections, the extension objection relation is a form of merged transference in which, although we are not the same thing, you are part of me, or I am part of you. We are slightly differentiated, but not completely separate. This becomes apparent if you are used to being the central figure in this object relation, and your extension doesn’t do things the way you want them done. You might feel very hurt and unsupported, as though part of your body hadn’t responded the way you wanted it to. This sense of hurt is what is called narcissistic wounding, meaning that one’s sense of self feels assaulted in some way. 

The work I have been doing internally has been around dissolving the narcissistic defenses of idealization and grandiosity. They are the defenses against feeling the emptiness underneath. Through this next piece of work I experienced the emptiness as of the shell of my ego. The identity of my ego is where all the images come from. I felt vulnerable, unprotected without this shell. That is when fear arose. I have been feeling depressed too. Depression aches, hurts, feels painful, pressure in chest. Depression wards off emptiness. Fear of feeling emptiness. Blank emptiness appears at some point. Emptiness feels different than other emptinesses I have experienced. A deficient emptiness, feels like loss, feels alone. There was absolutely nothing in this emptiness. Not hot or cold, no judgment, just neutrality, just is. This is what opened up to the vastness. But I felt a loss. When asked what was missing I heard from within, “me.” My familiar sense of identity was not in this emptiness. 

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.

A distinguishing characteristic of this dimension is a sense of being at ease and carefree. The body melts, as if it has been on a prolonged vacation in a tropical paradise, with one’s every need completely taken care of. There is not a worry in the world; instead, there is complete security and safety, fullness and abundance. The soul lets go of all of her protective and defensive devices and strategies, for in this realm there is no danger possible, and the heart is so secure and serene that even the concept of trouble does not exist. It is actually quite similar to how the human infant feels when it is completely taken care of, completely loved and cherished, with abundance of loving care all around, unquestionably available. The infant is then totally relaxed, the mind peaceful and empty, with no care, no tension, and no frustration. The infant feels, implicitly and without cognitive discrimination, that it is totally and unconditionally held. It is held physically, emotionally, energetically, and in all other ways. Similarly, the soul in this dimension feels the same, as if the universe is its loving and totally caring mother. The real world here, manifestation suffused by divine love, actually feels like the loving and caring hands of one’s mother. One feels in good hands, with all states of fulfillment. 

Love of truth is a subtle thing; it is the illumination, the radiance, and the melting sweetness of the heart. The animal soul, however, doesn’t love the truth. Not only that, it doesn’t even recognize love. This soul is dominated by cravings, by animal desires: “I want it because I gotta have it. What has love got to do with it?” This is just like when an animal feels, “I gotta have this meat.” It’s not out of appreciation or love. It’s more like, “If I don’t have it, I’m going to die.” This level of need and desire becomes the main barrier—and the most difficult one—to deal with when it comes to recognizing our love for the truth. This is the level of animal instincts, where motivation comes from instinctual needs for survival, pleasure, and social connections. These are very powerful drives that live at the bottom of the unconscious. More than any other influence, they make us forget about or ignore the truth. You may see the truth, but when an instinctual need comes up, you not only stop seeing the truth, you actually feel, “Who cares about the truth? If following my instinct means that I’ll survive, and I don’t know if I’ll survive if I follow the truth, then the choice is obvious.” Survival is what you go for. You forget truth because it feels like a luxury. In fact, the animal soul doesn’t just forget truth; its attitude is, “What’s that? What’s truth? You can either eat it or you can’t. If I can’t put truth in my mouth, what good is it? If I can’t play with it, what is it for? If it’s not fun, if it’s not filling, if it doesn’t make me feel safe and secure, I’m not interested.” The animal soul manifests as many kinds of desires, cravings, and needs. Pleasure is paramount. Even when truth comes, it’s good only if it is pleasurable. If it feels sweet, nice, yummy, that’s good. If it’s bland or bitter, it’s not the truth that’s wanted. 

However, the pearl beyond price feels personal without being the personality. It has the capacity to make a personal contact with another human being and still be free, totally unconditioned, free from the past and its influences. It is the most personally intimate aspect of oneself. Everyone recognizes what it is when he first sees it. Sometimes even the vaguest perception of it brings out the exclamation “but this feels like me, intimately me.” And yet it is not selfish like the personality. The personality is based on deficiency, and this is the source of its selfishness. But the pearl is based on true value and true fullness. In fact, it is itself fullness. 

That’s the reason I call it love, because it’s so sweet and soft. That’s how people think of love, as something sweet and soft, no? And as I said before, I call it divine partly because of its purity, its sense of being fresh and newly created, but also because it is everywhere and everything is made out of it. It’s like the whole world, the whole universe, is sculpted from glowing cotton candy or candy floss. When you’re experiencing the world in the dimension of Divine Love, everything glows from within; the walls glow, the air glows, everybody glows with an inner light. And the delicate softness and sweetness of it, it feels like it melts you, it makes you surrender, and it makes you let go.  But what does it mean when we describe this process as one of letting go, of surrender? It means that as you feel this boundless presence, it begins to expose the truth that you are of its nature. We call that surrender, as you lose your sense of separateness. We call it melting, but all that’s melting are your ideas, your beliefs, about who you think you are. So you think you’re a physical body, and then you realize you’re soft and malleable. You’re light—you’re made out of light and love. So you might say, “Oh, the light melted me,” but as we’ve seen, it’s just a figure of speech, a notion that doesn’t really describe what is happening. All that’s happening is that you’re discovering who and what you are. 

The childlike quality of the heart manifests as curiosity. Children want to know about everything. What is this and why is that? That attitude has to be there when you want to know what is here. You don’t want to leave any stone unturned. You want to know not from the goal-oriented scientific mind of trying to figure something out, but from the joy and wonder in every moment of discovery. If you really get into knowing what is here, each moment feels like the first time—just like a child who repeats something over and over again without losing any delight or interest. When you explore what is here and now, everything is always for the first time. Who we are is such an infinite richness. If we allow ourselves to go through that investigation, that loving and curious investigation, that then becomes life. Life is nothing but the unfoldment of who we are. Life is not about going to school, getting a job, getting married, having kids, going through a midlife crisis, getting old, getting sick. That is not life. Life is the unfoldment of the richness that is a human being. But if at the age of twenty-two or whenever you graduate, you say, “This is who I am. Now I am going to get this job and marry that person,” and you want who you take yourself to be to carry you through life, then you are already dead. You have already stopped. So, as you see, investigating who you are, doing the work, is nothing but authentic living. What you discover, what you experience, what you feel, is limitless.  

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. 

We also experience consciousness as presence and being, as the realm of the day. To move to the realm of the night, the absolute dimension of our true nature, consciousness needs to dissolve, needs to thin out till there is no existence at all. For consciousness to consume itself means that consciousness realizes that its existence isn’t really ultimate. For consciousness to consume itself means that consciousness realizes its own nonexistence. A deep longing for annihilation tends to arise in this process. We may experience this longing as passionate love. Essential passionate love is absolutely annihilating. The deeper the longing, the more intensely the passion burns. The sense of being consumed with passion feels like the night encroaching upon you and annihilating your being and consciousness. This passionate love is nothing but the Guest touching the consciousness. We can experience it either as the Guest passionately loving the consciousness or as the consciousness passionately loving the Absolute. In reality it is neither: We are simply realizing the inseparability of the consciousness and the ground. The consciousness is completely annihilated in this impassioned embrace. The mystical images of sexual union with God likely come from such experiences.

The disconnection from any manifestation of Being, any aspect of Essence, leaves not only a wound, but an emptiness. The disconnection is experienced as the state of the self when the essential aspect is missing. This state of deficiency is always experienced as a deficient emptiness, a hole in the self. This understanding is what we have termed the theory of holes. See Elixir of Enlightenment (AH Almaas, York Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, Inc., 1984), The Void (Almaas, 1986), and Diamond Heart, Book I (Almaas, 1987).

Narcissistic emptiness indicates the presence of the specific hole of the Essential Identity. This is the reason that its affect feels like not being oneself, not having a self, not being real, not being centered, not being present. 

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. 

The quality of absence inherent in the Absolute, its utter sense of openness and emptiness, is what makes the associated level of the shell feel like poverty. More precisely, the mysterious emptiness—which is a sense of indeterminacy and wonder when experienced clearly—is interpreted through the veil of the shell as a deficiency and lack. It is the source of all richness, but the fact that it feels like nothing makes the denuded self approaching it feel that it is poor and indigent. 

This shows that the perception of nonduality has many things in it, very profound things that don’t make sense, such as movement and stillness at the same time. How can that be? Nonduality means that they are the same. You and I are the same. Stillness is everywhere. Something and nothing are the same. Everybody is here, but the stillness feels like nothing. As we are seeing, there is more to reality than meets the eye. Even the ordinary world can be seen in a very different way that doesn’t make sense to our mind. It is important at such times to pay some attention to our fears, our conflicts, our beliefs and ideas about things in the world, the things we don’t believe . . . and our feelings about all of that. 

We would mention two points about Miller’s definition. First, the spirit of her description indicates a direct feel for the actuality of the self, and an intuition of the experience of self-realization. We see this in her reference to “certainty,” and in the observation that the experience is not based on reflection, but is like one’s own pulse. Certainty is one of the specific feelings that accompanies the recognition of one’s essential nature. One has an immediate and unquestioned certainty that one is, and what this isness feels like. One feels present, with the recognition that it is oneself that is present. It seems Miller has a sense of this sense, but she does not discuss it directly. 

This state of individuality lacks all other elements of being human, except for the sense of existing as an individual. It shows the ultimate outcome of identifying with separating boundaries. This is the most alienating of ego boundaries, and the most painful to work through. Its dissolution feels like a painful, terrifying and completely helpless state of fragmentation. But every student has to go through it, in order to dissolve this basic defensiveness. Its resolution involves working through the schizoid sectors of one’s ego, and leads to personalizing the human aspect of Essence, which feels like a clear and fresh running mountain brook. One then feels defenseless and vulnerable, but the vulnerability, rather than being threatening, is accepted as a quality of being human. 

The primordial presence, on the other hand, is nondual in all respects. The sense of wholeness means all dimensions of the self—the conventional and the essential—constitute one indivisible whole. We experience everything as presence, including thoughts and feelings. We are a presence coemergent with the body; the body feels like a part of this presence. This is also true of images, feelings, and activities. At this level even the ego structures, with their images and object relations, are seen to be part of this presence. We are aware of these structures of internalized images, but they appear as less luminous patterns within the overall presence. There is one presence, whole, continuous and homogeneous, clear and transparent. Within this pure presence appear many colorful and exquisite forms, but they are manifestations of and within the same presence. These forms are the various essential aspects, the natural manifestations of the flow of Being. But there also appear a different kind of forms, patterns of light, texture, and color. These forms have various degrees of vividness and luminosity, some transparent and vivid, some dull and thick. These are the thoughts and feelings, and also the body and its sensations. Generally speaking, continuing to be present in this condition tends to clarify and purify the areas of dullness and thickness. The process of clarification occurs naturally and spontaneously, but is aided greatly by inquiry and understanding, because there are always areas of the self that remain obscure and unconscious. 

When you relate to someone in a deep way, you fill your holes with the other person. Some of your holes get filled with what you believe you’re getting from the other person. For example, you may feel valued because this person appreciates you. You don’t know consciously that you’re filling the hole with their appreciation. But when you are with that person, you feel valuable, and unconsciously you feel the other person is responsible for your value. Whatever this person is giving you feels like a part of you; it is part of the fullness that you experience. Your unconscious does not see that part of the person that makes you feel valuable as separate; you see it as part of you. When the person dies or the relationship ends, you don’t feel that you’re losing that person; you feel you’re losing whatever is filling the hole. You experience the loss of a part of yourself. That is why it is so painful. It feels like you’re being cut and something is being taken out of you. That’s what the wound and the pain are about—the hurt of loss. You may feel as if you lost your heart, your security, your strength, your will—whatever the person fulfilled for you. When you lose a person close to you, you feel whatever hole that person has filled. That’s one thing people are talking about when they say that we “fit” each other. Each person fits the other’s holes. This fits into this hole, that fits into that hole. When two people live together, they may feel full and complete because they feel themselves as complementary; together they make a unified whole. 

Now we can see what the ego ideal is trying to emulate. Brilliancy, or essential intelligence, has the affect of completeness, of no gap, of nothing missing. Hence it feels like perfection. Since it expresses our being in all of its sublime qualities, it is pure perfection. This is an instance of the connection between the holy idea—holy perfection, for the One—and the essential endowment; brilliancy with its inherent perfection. The perfection is not in something external or in an action or creation; nor is it based on a standard. The perfection is in the presence itself, which is completeness and also preciousness. So its affect includes all of these: completeness, rightness in all ways, perfection, preciousness, and innocence. From these affects come the traits of this type. Since Ones want to express the preciousness of true nature but don’t actually know it, they want things and people, including themselves, to be complete, right, and perfect. They feel that their moral principles come from their conscience because they strongly believe their conscience knows what makes everything precious—and potentially perfect. While in reality their sense of preciousness is a mere reflection of the preciousness of true nature. 

Before I started talking, I felt scared, burned out, and hurt—the things I had been feeling for the last month. I also felt at some point a sense of clear spaciousness, and a crystal kind of clarity. Then I started feeling something sparkling, like flashes of light. I became aware of a presence like a point of concentration in my head. It felt just like a point, no dimension to it, but seemed indestructible; there was no question of it being destroyed or altered by anything outside. When I felt this concentrated presence in my chest, it made me want to laugh and smile. I stopped myself, still holding on to the hurt. Then I felt it warm my whole chest. It felt wonderful! The hurt left, it felt like I was healing. There was an itch in the center of my chest where the hurt had been. I felt especially close to myself. Somehow, I felt very different, like a child and not knowing how to relate to other people, a little embarrassed, I think. After group I felt a lot of peace and happiness. Later when my wife and I made love I felt the pointed presence in a very wonderful way. My mind questions this (of course!), Is it real? Could I have such a thing? But the experience is still there and my questions just disappear when I sense this presence. When I sense this presence, that feels like a point of consciousness and joy, as I move around, it seems the whole rest of me, body and mind, is there to move it around. 

But that is not the true meaning of True Nature, of presence. When we explore what presence feels like, when we experience its luminosity, we recognize that, though it can feel substantial, it has no substance; it is not solid at all. Even though, when we first encounter it, we know that presence is what truly exists, our mind mistakenly conceives of its existence in the same way that we think a rock exists. But in doing that, we reify it, we concretize it, and miss its very nature. So we take presence to be existence, but the existence of presence is not like the existence of the body, for example, because it is not an object. Even though we say that presence is our being, that it is the authentic ontological ground of our consciousness, neither being nor existence are what we are referring to when we speak of the existence of a rock or a chair. We need to be very subtle in our understanding of what “presence is being” means. We need to recognize the pitfall of the tendency to objectify. This tendency to objectify is always an attempt to get away from this truth, from this reality that I am referring to as the black hole. And we are always trying to get away from it because it is always here; we cannot escape it. And somehow, we are aware of that inescapability, we intuit it. We are continuously trying to create solidity because if we let ourselves completely relax, we will find out that the nature of presence itself is completely, absolutely nothing—it is more nothing than the nothing of empty space. It is nonbeing itself and nonbeing, because they are conceptual. 

Many teachings report the experience of a point of light that shines like a star, usually emerging at first glimpse like a shooting star. But then it might appear zipping around our consciousness without us knowing what it is, even though we can be taken by its radiance and sparkle. It is mostly recognized or experienced by those who have some inner vision, since the feeling by itself does not evoke the sense of a shining star, but rather, of a point of presence. However, if our feeling sense of it is sustained, we may recognize what it feels like and what it stands for. It is true that it feels like presence concentrated in a point, the way Nisargadatta Maharaj knew and described it. But we may then recognize that it has in it another affect besides the self-knowing as a point of presence. This affect is an essential sense of “I,” a definite feeling of identity. It is a feeling or affect of identity that is not learned or borrowed but inherent to it. Hence it naturally has the knowledge of itself as self, as “I,” as identity that is irreducible and impossible to explain by other things. The point of presence is not a construct or mental knowledge; it is gnostic, immediate knowing of the point, of what it is. This also shows that the sense of identity, the sense of “I,” is a Platonic idea, not created by mind or borrowed from others. 

How can heart be so empty that it feels like the very presence of absence? All this time, I have known heart to contain the very richness and fullness of Being. It takes several days of contemplation, with curiosity and openness of mind, before I begin to understand the crystal structure, the crystal heart. This inquiry takes me through a process of becoming aware of a region of my soul that I have never seen so completely or so graphically. I become aware at some point of a certain unclarity in my consciousness that reveals, upon inquiry, a thick and opaque part of my soul. I feel, mostly in my belly and pelvis, some kind of a blobby structure of soul that appears polluted, dirty, almost nauseating. The first reaction is disgust and repulsion, but because of the presence of the crystal heart, and my true desire to see the truth of the situation, I am able to hold this arising manifestation of my soul with an open and inquiring mind. It becomes clear that the turbidity and obscuration in this soul structure is due to a constellation of desires, impulses, needs and wants . . . . . .

Investigating this manifestation while experiencing it as a primitive structure of the soul, I recognize that its main quality is attachment. In other words, this nauseating-looking manifestation of the soul is the repository of all my attachments, in the various areas of my mind and life. I see these attachments very clearly. I see the state of attachment, the objects of attachment, and my hopes and desires regarding them. I live with this explicit manifestation of my attachments for several days. As my understanding regarding the various attachments and their dynamics and effects grows, the crystal heart reveals its nature and function. 

What do you become clear and awakened to? Your nature, to what is you. You become a light, but the light—by becoming light—becomes awakened to itself as a light. You become a light unto yourself. What you awaken to, which is a specific effect of the brilliant drink, is that your nature itself is pure preciousness itself, the utmost preciousness that there can be. So you realize that your nature is not only luminous and brilliant intelligence, but that it is precious. You see and appreciate now the sense of preciousness of Being, which is your essence and the substance of your consciousness. It is this preciousness that awakens, it is this preciousness that wakes you up, and it is this preciousness that you awaken to. This is the preciousness of Being, of Essence, and the preciousness of what a human being is. But it is not like you are seeing something that is precious. This is only the Brilliancy itself when it is diamondized, when it is in the diamond or crystalline form. In other words, this presence of diamond Brilliancy is the essential prototype of the quality of preciousness. It is Being manifesting its preciousness, or manifesting as preciousness. That by itself feels like the presence of preciousness. And that preciousness, that luminous crystalline diamond Brilliancy, or brilliant diamondness, as it flows into the head, is experienced the way Yvonne described in her experience a few minutes ago. As it flows into the head, it gives you not only the experience of awakening, but of awakening with a joyous sense to it. You are so awake, the mind is so awake, your Being is so awake, the soul is so awake, the awakeness is so extreme, that you experience yourself drunk. You are actually drunk on awakeness. 

It is our observation that most of the translated Dzogchen texts (and to a slightly lesser degree, the Mahamudra texts) on nondual presence describe it in a way that can qualify it as either pure Being or non-conceptual reality. Both these levels of manifestation of Being are characterized by awareness which is both presence and openness. Pure Being feels like a presence that is inseparable from the sense of total lightness and openness. It is both fullness and nothingness. This paradoxical quality is even sharper in the experience of nonconceptual reality, where we feel it as a presence that is at the same time an absence. The emptiness here is much more than the nothingness of pure Being. It is so empty that it is actually a total absence. 

This is the animal soul at the beginning of ego structuring, where the soul’s animal potential is all contained in one structure. This is a much more primitive structure than the soul child, for it is not patterned by the human body image. This structure forms the more primitive ground of the soul child, and hence will generally arise as we make the soul child more transparent. It is a structure of a living entity, shapeless and formless, but has individual boundaries, for it appears as an entity. It feels like a primitive animalistic creature that is completely run by the instinctual drives and appetites. Its aliveness and dynamism are much more total than those of the soul child, appearing frequently as a writhing, wiggling, but powerful organism with no fixed shape or size. Civilized society does not know how to deal with this aspect of the soul, so it relegates it to our subterranean depths, by repressing it in the unconscious or disowning it as a split-off part of us of which we are not normally aware. Because it is usually disowned by society and the individual, it becomes a pure animal soul, devoid of any human concerns or sentiments. In other words, splitting it off into a disowned and rejected part of the soul involves the creation of a soul structure that is separate from and not impacted by the other and more human elements of the soul’s potential. This dissociation from human concerns, which means absence of heart, appears in the experience of the libidinal soul in being irrational, guiltless, ruthless, completely selfish and self-centered. 

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.  

One significant observation here is the recognition that when the soul is completely structureless, before any development or maturity, the state feels fluid, and is similar to plasma or, more accurately, protoplasm. The actual texture and viscosity of the soul substance feels similar to egg white before itis cooked. We have seen that as the soul manifests more and more primitive forms of her potential she becomes more protoplasmic, like a jellyfish or an amoeba. When these structures finally dissolve what is left is a simple medium that feels like protoplasm. This is the most primitive the soul can be and still feel like a living presence. To experience herself in the mineral or metallic state does not feel primitive and there is no structure. The sense of life is gone; only consciousness remains. This is an interesting fact. It shows an isomorphism between the soul and the physical body. Just as the body is basically protoplasm, the soul is basically a protoplasmic presence. Presence here is still a field of consciousness, but lacks clarity and discrimination. It is like a somewhat dull consciousness, just as protoplasm is dull in luminosity in comparison to light. It turns out protoplasm is the quality of the soul’s presence that indicates the state of the soul before evolution. It is not exactly primitive; it is just the basic substance of the soul before she begins her journey of maturity. However, this does not mean that there is a time when the soul is in this condition and then must evolve to experience her more evolved forms of experience. The soul always has the infinite potential of all her evolutionary stages, but that her most dominant condition is one of the stages. 

We can also experience our dynamism as the very substance of the soul being made out of a medium that is scintillating, exploding with life and consciousness. It feels like a pulsating, breathing medium, glowing with life and energy. It actually feels it is breathing, even though there is no oxygen exchange or anything like that. It is the sense of pulsation, of a teeming aliveness. This dynamic fundamental dimension of the soul is the basic property, the inherent force that impels her toward manifestation. This dynamic pulsating quality to our consciousness appears to us as a flow, as the unfoldment of our potential. This dynamism is the intrinsic energy and power that makes it possible for our soul to manifest her hidden potential, to create her forms. It is a creative dynamism, literally generating her forms of experience by metamorphosing her very presence. It manifests the forms of all of our experiences through a morphogenic transformation of her very substance. In this morphogenic transubstantiation she expresses her excitatory pulsation, her motile dynamism. This dynamism generates forms through morphing.

I have been emphasizing absence because it is the essence of the Absolute, but the Absolute is the nondifferentiated coemergence and coextensiveness of consciousness and emptiness, of presence and absence. The Absolute is a presence that is at the same time absence. In this condition, you experience everything as usual, both you and the world. You live a normal life, and everything exists in the sense that it feels like the pure presence of consciousness. Simultaneously, you feel and know that nothing exists. So there is both presence and absence at the same time. Consciousness exists, in the sense that it appears in and as experience without its being a construct, but its nature is absence. True nature is both being and nonbeing, both presence and absence, but also not either, because these two facets are not differentiated. Everything has this nature, and everything is constituted by this nature. You realize that even the physical matter in front of you is the Absolute. There is no difference. Such perception implies a further and deeper integration and understanding of the Absolute.