In an encounter of the third kind with true nature, you recognize true nature as it is. This means not only experiencing it, but experiencing it in its purity, experiencing it as it is. We will spend some time deconstructing our ideas about what it means to see true nature as it is because we have already had many experiences of true nature and have developed many smart ideas about what it is. And yet if we consider all our spiritual experiences, we can see that each of them feels like reality as it is. What does it mean to have many different experiences, each of which feels like an encounter with reality? Recognizing true nature in its purity means directly seeing that it is not constructed. Reality is not a construction of the mind. It is not an emotion or reaction of the heart. It is not a sensation of the body. Even though true nature is independent of all mind, heart, and body, it expresses itself through them, maturing them by utilizing them. An encounter of the third kind is the experiential recognition of spirit as spirit—experientially knowing that spirit is and knowing spirit in its purity. We will leave aside for the moment what spirit is, whether God or Buddha nature or something else. For this kind of direct encounter, it is simply enough that we recognize that spirit is, that we can experience spirit without an intermediary. 

I became aware of this discriminating intelligence and guidance of true nature early in this teaching, and I was able to use it and function with it. When I’m exploring something or trying to find out about something, it is simply there. It is close at hand, and I can use it at will. I can focus on something and it begins to operate. Being naïve, I assumed that this function of true nature was like any other quality of presence and that it would be easy for people to experience it, embody it, and function with it. But through the years I have come to see that this is not the case. There is something about this manifestation, this face of true nature, that is particularly elusive. Most people don’t even get close to the experience of it, regardless of how awakened they are. Somebody can be awakened, can be experiencing presence and awareness and realization, but this penetrating intelligence is not necessarily present. Or we can have the experience of it but it doesn’t seem to function. We are not able to utilize it for our inquiry. We might experience the presence, which feels like a scintillating, radiating, tingly presence in the forehead, but it doesn’t function to clarify our inquiry. Or we might experience its presence and be able to function with it, but with limited degrees of facility and completeness.

The state of poverty, which some traditions call “mystical poverty,” is the expression of the transformation of narcissistic emptiness into true inner spaciousness, a profound void now penetrating the shell due to the shell’s almost complete denudement. As the self is letting go of its representations of itself, which feels like the surrendering of everything she believed she possessed, she becomes increasingly transparent to the presentations of Being. She experiences a new profundity of true emptiness—black space—but it is reflected through a slight vestige of psychic structure, the concept of entity. So she feels this emptiness as the poverty of her sense of self. As the student remains in this condition, surrendering all manipulations and desires, this profound emptiness dissolves the remaining vestiges of structure, and propels her into the full and direct experience of this deepest of all voids. But she then discovers that this most profound inner spaciousness is also identical to the absolute depth of all Being. She has arrived home; her poverty has been the doorway. Although the process of transformation of narcissism at this level is similar to the general process of going through any level of fundamental narcissism, it has some differentiating properties which reflect the level of the true self being realized. The sense of poverty of the shell is an indirect reflection of the truth of this depth of Being. 

The Essential Identity is a simple, pure sense of presence which feels like self, like “I.” It is so simple that it is a subtle matter to differentiate it from other feelings. It is what gives the self the capacity for self-recognition in the essential dimension. It is not the typical sense of identity that most of us know. The typical feeling of identity is only a reflection of the essential identity. When we say that the Essential Identity gives the self the feeling of identity, we do not mean that it is the usual kind of feeling, like an emotion or sensation. The feeling of an essential presence is part of its very substance; it is a quality of consciousness, a felt knowingness, a state with a recognizable quality. The closest we can come to describing the present quality is to call it a feeling of identity. We believe that this quality is the prototype of the feeling of identity. This pure feeling of identity is a basic self-existing category of experience. It is not a combination of feelings or images, or the result of such a combination. It is elemental; thus, we call it a Platonic form. The self’s feeling of identity in the presence of the Essential Identity is simple and immediate, unlike the normal sense of identity which is an affect based on past experience. 

As you stay with this hole, essential Will begins to arise in your consciousness, and is experienced at first as a sense of determination— “I will do that”—and a sense of confidence. As you experience this, you see that what you had previously called “will” on the level of the personality is very different from essential Will. On the essential level, it feels like a sense of inner support that imparts the capacity to persevere effortlessly because one is confident in one’s capacity to do so. Effort, the hallmark of fake will, becomes meaningless on this level because we see that real will means “going with the flow” of one’s Being. If efforting is still present, it means that you are still identified to some extent with the personality. So essential Will is an effortless steadfastness in carrying out the task at hand, resulting from a sense of inner support and confidence. When we first experience real personal Will, as opposed to the willfulness of the personality, we see that it has this sense of effortlessness about it. It does involve action, but not trying. When you experience this, you begin to get the intimation that essential Will doesn’t mean choosing or controlling whatever situation you are in. Because you feel supported by the universe when you are in contact with Being, you don’t need to try to make things happen in a premeditated kind of way, and so your action becomes effortless and spontaneous. 

The soul feels any sense of movement away from total intimacy with the absolute mystery to be an intolerable loss. However, regardless of her resistance and protest, it finally dawns on her that she cannot stay where she is, and that it is not up to her personal choice. At some point she recognizes that her unfoldment is taking her to a place different than the transcendent absolute ipseity. She might feel the arising of a great sadness, tremendous grief. It may take her a long time before she realizes that there is no loss of the total intimacy with the absolute, that she does not have to actually leave her home to go on to these further stations. As she surrenders to the dynamism of Being, and ceases to hold on to her realization of the absolute ipseity, she recognizes and surrenders her attachment to the absolute realization. In this process she discovers that while it is true that she is on a journey of descent from the heights of transcendence, this journey is not a separation from the absolute. The descent is a descent into limitation, but it is the descent not of her individual sense of herself, but the descent of the ipseity itself. In other words, she descends into the limitations of the world not as a soul entity, but as the absolute mystery itself. Nevertheless, this process feels like separation and loss; it is more than the soul has wanted, and a journeying further when she wants to journey no more. However, she recognizes these manifestations of a sense of loss, separation, resistance, and grief, which became familiar phenomena in her journey of ascent to the absolute. Whenever the dynamism of Being unfolds her experience to another dimension of Being, the soul always feels that she is going to lose whatever she has realized. Every time her unfoldment takes her to a further dimension, she cannot but feel it as a separation from, a leaving of, and a loss of, the station at which she has stabilized. As the soul begins the journey of descent, the station she feels she has to leave is that of union with her ultimate Beloved and home, which she clearly knows as the deepest of all truths. She finally learns to surrender to the flow, mostly out of love for the absolute ipseity, for she recognizes that it is the source of all unfoldment. 

The loss of this wholeness is equivalent to the loss of contact with all the aspects of Essence. This explains why the empty shell that is due to the loss of the primal self feels like the shells of all of the other forms of narcissism combined. The primal self is the wholeness that implicitly includes the qualities of the true self of all later stages, in an undifferentiated way. From this perspective, we can understand the manifestations of oral narcissism as the expression of the self identifying itself with the oral, deficient, and empty self, the self that feels itself as an empty, impoverished bag, because of the loss of its core, its inherent essential richness. The empty, hungry self is the experience of the self patterned by the structure that develops as a reaction to the disturbances of the primal self. This empty self then relates to the world in an oral way, trying to regain its earlier perfection and wholeness by devouring and possessing the exciting objects that it believes are the sources of acclaim, admiration, and idealization. The underlying image of this exciting and desirable object is the full and luscious breast of the all-good mother. And we agree with Kernberg that the “lack of an integrated self is also characterized by chronic feelings of unreality, puzzlement, emptiness, or general disturbances in the ‘self feeling’ . . . as well as in a marked incapacity to perceive oneself realistically as a total human being.”(Kernberg, 1975, p. 316) We would only substitute “wholeness” for “integrated self” and understand the “total human being” to mean the “total completeness of human Being.” 

For instance, the idealizing transference might be disrupted by what the student feels is an unempathic response from the teacher. If he takes this event to indicate the imperfection of the teacher’s sensitivity and compassion, this means that he experiences the teacher as lacking the quality of compassion on the dimension of the Diamond Will, that is, as support. This typically will bring to consciousness the childhood situation in which the student felt that one of his parents did not compassionately relate to who he was. Issues arise about the need for the parent’s compassionate support, with the associated object relations, emotional hurt, and other feelings. This exploration will lead to the deficient emptiness of support, which can then usher the student into the experience of true support. In this context, the student’s experience of support will include not only solidity and confidence—which indicate Will—but also qualities of warmth, gentleness, and loving kindness. He feels like a solid and immense mountain, a brilliant emerald mountain, with an exquisite gentleness and a sacred sense of compassion. It is as if the immensity has a heart of total empathy and deep consideration for the suffering of the self, both his and others. His heart melts in exquisite warm surrender when he observes the effort that those around him are furiously engaged in as they attempt to find themselves or to support themselves. In this state, he cannot help but recognize that this search, with all its activities, is both an expression and a perpetuation of the deepest and most fundamental suffering that the self may experience. He recognizes with clarity and exquisite kindness the futility of this activity, and feels a deep spontaneous wish to be of help in alleviating this suffering. 

So depending on how completely we have integrated this particular essential aspect—how transparent we are to it, how much we have realized it, how close it is to our conscious experience—our capacity for discerning truth will be more or less developed. When we experience our consciousness as truth, it attains a solid-gold quality. This is because Truth is the Gold aspect. And when our presence feels like solid gold, we are experiencing the presence of Truth. Similarly, when we experience our consciousness as a delicate Blue presence, it has become the presence of knowingness. So Truth is a golden presence, a solid, definite, shiny metallic gold. It has an aliveness, a consciousness, an awareness in it, because it is an element of consciousness. The presence of Truth feels real, dense, compact, warm, and quite smooth. It has a sense of preciousness that makes it feel very close to our heart, as if it were the depth of the heart itself. Because there is such a thing as a Truth aspect, it is possible to investigate in depth and in detail what truth is, in terms of dimensions, levels, situations, whatever. Truth becomes something that can be explored specifically and precisely. And understanding will deepen only if we move to deeper and deeper dimensions of truth. 

One of these days, in the afternoon, I begin to experience a dense heaviness near the stomach. The stomach area comes to feel thick, dense, bulky and heavy. I observe that the sensation of heaviness in this particular location makes it difficult for me to do my work, for I need to be empty and open to have the sensitivity that my work requires. I remember now feeling the same sensation the night before, when I felt as if someone had punched me in the stomach. The awareness now, as I contemplate the experience, is that there is something like a big slug in the area of the stomach. It gradually becomes clear, as I continue to be present to it, that it is a presence of some manifestation of consciousness which feels lead-like. There is a sensation of something that feels almost like an object, which is heavy, opaque and dense, but also with the somewhat soft, thick and metallic texture of lead . . . . .

By night I realize the thickness is a lead ball, what I would call a lead pearl. However, as I remain aware of it, it begins to attain a diamond-like hardness that lead does not usually possess, as if the leaden ball at the stomach has become faceted and crystallized. In other words, the heaviness has become quite specific, taking the form of what could be called a diamond lead pearl. The feeling in this faceted leaden hardness is similar to the essential quality of will, but has also a sense of existence. Will, as a specific aspect of Being, feels like a solidity with the felt characteristics of immovability, determination and persistence, almost like a natural and healthy stubbornness. Will is a quality I recognize, which makes it possible to understand the meaning of the present experience of the diamond lead pearl. The throbbing sensation at the forehead, indicating the presence of nous, begins to luminate, a lumination that translates into precise understanding of what I am experiencing. I recognize the faceted leaden heaviness as an imitation of an essential manifestation of Being, the true will to exist. 

In fact, as we move through the inner journey, we feel a pull, a movement, a love, toward the spiritual pole, which makes us feel that we are going away from the world and from the people in the world. This will bring up our attachment and, underlying that, the love of the world and beings of the world and things of the world. But, again, just to be in the spiritual and forget the world will feel to most people not completely satisfying, regardless of how blissful their spiritual experience. Even the experience of the spiritual ground—when we get to our spiritual home and are living in that intimacy—is beautiful, but at some point, it feels like something is not right, not complete. And we begin to be aware that “Yes, I love the spirit—but I also love the world.” Whenever we emphasize one part at the expense of the other, we begin to feel a state of incompleteness. Many of us do a lot of things to attempt to bring the two together, to harmonize the two loves. And some of you have seen how, when you really feel the love, it is not two loves. But our heart is divided mainly because of our mind. Our mind believes that there are two worlds, two realities. One is the physical world—the everyday world of me, you, everybody else; the houses, cars, planets, and galaxies. The other is the world of spirit, the world of mystery—the unseen, invisible world, the world of total harmony, the world of purity, of pure light, pure radiance, perfect presence, the world of the divine. 

The objective view that the Holy Ideas explicate is that Essence is actually the nature of our consciousness and the nature of everything. The more we see this, the more faith develops in us. That is the work of self-realization—to become aware of, to become certain of, and to become continuously in touch with, the fact that Essence is one’s intrinsic nature. It is difficult work, but that is the Work. When I say that Essence is the essence of the soul, I am describing the initial experience of it. At the beginning, it feels like there is a soul and there is Essence inside it, like a container with its content. This is not really the situation, but it feels that way initially because of the limitations imposed on our experience by our identifications. If our minds are not identified with anything, we see that Essence is completely coemergent with the soul, just as the molecules are coemergent with your body. Essence is inseparable from the soul; it is part and parcel of it. Any sense of separation is due to a mental delusion, specifically, the one resulting from the absence of Holy Origin.

I think it is obvious that if you are not curious or if your love for the truth is limited, then you will not become sufficiently engaged or expend the energy necessary to find out the truth. But when you’re really curious about something in your experience that you do not understand, the love of the truth will translate into an insatiable hunger—the fuel for Spacecruiser Inquiry. Curiosity expresses this passionate love for the truth, so it wants to be totally immersed in the experience. This force wants to penetrate the situation, to open it up, to illuminate it, to come to know it as fully and as completely as possible. It does not want to just witness it from a distance. Now sometimes the unfoldment can become like watching an intense, thrilling mystery at the movies: You’re enraptured and can’t wait to see what’s going to happen. But even then, you’re not just passively watching the mystery, because your own involvement and engagement has something to do with what arises. When your soul wants to know what it feels like—in your body, in your emotions, and in your experience—then you are really curious, then you are really beginning to inquire. 

More precisely, the soul experiences the inadequacy of holding as an inner disruption, an undesirable and threatening difficulty. She reacts to this with an array of inner postures and strategies that end up dissociating her even more from her nature. The disruption and the reaction happen together, resulting in a dissociation from the ground of presence. Initially this happens every time the holding is not adequate enough, with the soul returning to her homeostatic state of simply being when the care becomes adequate again. However, repeated or continual inadequacy of holding, which is what most individuals endure, finally erodes the basic trust that makes it possible for the soul to resume simply being. The reactivity becomes habitual and structured into the soul, built into the very fabric of her developing character and identity. The soul loses the ability to simply be; she even forgets what it feels like. Instead of experiencing a continuity of being, the soul experiences a continuity of reaction. This reactivity not only annihilates her being, but also obstructs her dynamism from manifesting the necessary forms for her harmonious and optimal development. The personal patterns this reactivity takes tend to become rigid forms that limit the soul’s dynamic unfoldment, by channeling it through these forms. She loses her allowing openness, which is bound to constrict her creative dynamism. This dynamic is universal for the early life of the soul, but if it were the only one not all souls would dissociate from the essential ground. However, the process of dissociation is inevitable, as we shall see in our discussion of other factors contributing to the loss of contact with Being. 

A question may arise here about the relation of pure consciousness to awareness, and whether the ultimate truth of the self is emptiness, as Buddhism teaches. This is a matter of subtlety in the experience of the presence of consciousness. Emptiness is the ultimate truth of the soul not in the sense that a soul does not appear to awareness, but that her mode of existence is beyond our normal concept and feeling of existence. This mode is called emptiness, and feels like spacious absence of any substance. Yet this emptiness is also inseparable from a transparent clarity—as formulated by Buddhist schools—both constituting a unity that characterizes both soul and universe. When we experience the coemergence of emptiness and clarity we recognize it as pure awareness, and feel it phenomenologically as presence. Awareness is then consciousness, but consciousness experienced inseparable from emptiness. Therefore, we are at this point discussing consciousness and not awareness, not because we do not think that the ground of the soul is awareness, but because to discuss awareness accurately we need to first understand emptiness. We will do this later in chapters 19 and 21, but continue our discussion here without explicitly differentiating consciousness from awareness. This subtle differentiation is not material at this point of the discussion. 

This sense of personal identity is experienced as the most distilled, inner aspect of the personality, which is usually protected by the defensive structures of the ego. It is this which withdraws in the schizoid withdrawal, avoiding contact, interaction and any strong emotional experience, because it is felt to be too much for one’s structure. Guntrip writes about the schizoid defense:

We have seen how too early and too intense fear and anxiety in an infant who is faced with an environment that he cannot cope with and does not feel nourished by, sets up a retreat from outer reality, and distorts ego-growth by a powerful drive to withdrawal and passivity. The infant cannot take literal flight, and can only take flight in a mental sense, into an attempt to create and possess an hallucinated or fantasied safety in a purely psychic world which is part of his own experience, an inner world split off from the realities of everyday living. [Harry Guntrip, Schizoid Phenomena, Object-Relations, and the Self, p. 87]

This happens in the process of inner realization as the individual works through the various defenses against this withdrawn part of the ego, this sheltered part of the personality. Usually, when this happens, the individual feels lazy, lethargic and uninterested in anything. He feels like just staying in bed, doing nothing and feeling nothing, just being cozy and safe in a warm place. Contact with Being is felt as dangerous because it is very intense and will cause too intense a sensation. However, Being is present in the experience. Observing this, one becomes aware that there must be some way that this part of the personality is keeping itself from contact with Being. When identified with this ego part one feels separate from Being, without a feeling of interest or curiosity about it. The 

This is how it was for us at the beginning with the breast. You had an empty stomach, you were at the breast, and nutrients came from the breast into you. So it’s understandable that we end up believing the world functions in that way. For the first year of life, that was our basic experience. There’s a breast, a mommy, a you, and a stomach. The breast is either good or bad, either full or empty, and the stomach is either being fed or not being fed. Those sensations of hunger that are relieved by a breast feeding what eventually feels like your stomach are at the core of the object relations we enact in our life. So your deepest identification is that you’re a stomach. Your earliest relationship with your mother is as an embryo attached through the umbilical cord and later as an infant suckling at the breast. Usually, the experience of that identity feels empty and vulnerable. You feel cut off and in search of connection. You might feel as though some kind of umbilical cord is missing. When you experience this embryonic identity, which is earlier than the symbiotic stage, you want that umbilical connection to the mother. But even that is an object relation. You believe the resolution will be connection to the secure other that is the source. But by that very definition, you’re empty. Whatever you seek, you haven’t got. When you were in the womb, when you were suckling at your mother’s breast, you didn’t have it. You were helpless and vulnerable. You didn’t have anything. Everything came from outside. 

When we see the Holy Love quality of the nature of Being, we see its preciousness. Its radiant glory feels like a sunrise. Inferiority is the negation of this glory, and the specific reaction is an attempt to get away from that diminished sense of self. What is needed is to confront that part of our psyche rather than to run from it, so that we are not afraid to wake up to ourselves. As we understand it, the sense of inferiority develops not because you are a child, or you happen to have some defect in your body or some social lack in your environment. Its origin stems from the fact of not recognizing the precious quality of your Beingness, and this lack of recognition is universal, with very few exceptions. Even if you felt loved by your parents, for instance, they didn’t necessarily love you because they could see the preciousness of your Being; they loved you for what you did, how you behaved, whether you were smart or cute or pretty, and so on. Because the preciousness of your nature itself was not seen and loved, you would still feel inferior. There are, of course, more traumatic reasons why children grow up with the feeling of inferiority beyond the fact that their preciousness was not seen and held. Some children are mistreated, unloved, neglected, and so on. Any lack of holding—physical, emotional or spiritual—will affect the child in such a way as to engender a sense of inferiority. The child does not see that its soul has that innate, intrinsic, and fundamental quality of being the most precious and wonderful thing in the whole universe. The child loses this sense of herself, and part of the resulting sleep is identifying with the consensus reality in which the parents live. Later, you explain the feelings of inferiority with whatever means you can find, such as physical appearance, behaviors, intelligence, capacities, and so on, with children of different ages emphasizing different things. 

You usually think of support as doing something, but real support has nothing to do with that. It is an inner sense of solidity, of a solid ground within you that feels like support for being truly yourself. True support is our contact with a certain quality of our Being, which is an authentic sense of presence, which is beingness. When this inherent inner support is not present in our experience of ourselves, we start to effort. Efforting becomes the ego’s way of acquiring support or of supporting ourselves. The fact is that this efforting cuts us off from our true and essential support, which is complete effortlessness. Essential support is an aspect of Essence, so it is Being, but in a solid, firm, and strong way, the way a mountain is present.

You are furnishing your future, all the time, by continuing your past. Everyone wants to continue in the same way, yet you wonder why your life does not seem fresh or new, why instead, it feels like a swamp. You say you want newness, life, freshness, change, transformation. But this would mean that the past is left in the past. Is it possible for us to be here without the past? What I’m saying is not original. Every spiritual teacher says the same thing: the point is not success or happiness, the point is to be real. I’m saying this now so that you can understand the situation, not so that you do something about it. We are trying to understand what it is to live life, not the way our parents said it should be, or the way the books say it should be, not according to our ideas or other people’s ideas, but the way it is—how things are according to reality. We want to learn how to let the rose bush produce roses, how to let it be a rose bush rather than trying to change it into something else. We haven’t yet explored the extent to which we try to control things, how much we try to twist reality’s arm. We need to see the situation as completely and as accurately as possible. The problem is not that we want to be happy, but that we are going about it in the wrong way. When we really see that we are going about it in the wrong way, we quit. And then life can unfold on its own. We cannot make it unfold. We can quit our rejection, our judgment, our intolerance, but we will quit these patterns only when we completely and totally see what they are doing—that they are hurting us. We still don’t understand that our attitudes, ideas, and beliefs are actually responsible for our suffering. We pay lip service to this idea but we don’t know it completely and totally. So we continue in our old patterns. The work we do here is simply to see the picture completely, seeing exactly what it is you are doing and how that affects reality. 

We see here the experience of essential Love on at least two levels. On the first level, it feels like a sweet and fluffy presence, like cotton candy. There is sweetness and appreciation, lightness and pleasure. Then essential Love can move to the next level, the diamond level, when our understanding of Love and the issues around it becomes precise and specific. This gives Love itself a precision and an objectivity that then make it feel clear and crystalline. The cotton candy loses its fluffiness and is replaced by objectivity and clarity. It becomes a presence that has clear and crystalline qualities to it, but it still retains its sweetness, lightness, and appreciative quality. This can be felt as the purity of Love, as Stewart felt. This also points to the fact that Love is an expression of Being and is not merely an emotion. Stewart experienced it as having texture, taste, and viscosity, in addition to having an effect. This is because Essence is a presence, an ontological reality with its own phenomenological characteristics, which makes it almost like a physical substance. This shows the fundamental reality of Essence, as contrasted with the ephemeral nature of feelings and thoughts. 

Now imagine your heart being just like that—your heart is a mouth tasting a softness, a tenderness, a melty sweetness. There is nothing like it; it is not exactly like sugar or any form of the sweetness you can find. The closest to it would be to take a strawberry—a very ripe, sweet strawberry—make it fluffy and soft, and add a bit of rose water. That’s close to how it tastes and smells. It has that nice light pink look to it, too. That is why I sometimes call the aspect of love that we are working with “pink cotton candy” (candy floss). It is as though your heart were full of pink cotton candy that is always melting—but always replenishing itself too. The more it melts, the more it replenishes itself.  And love is not simply a sweetness all by itself; in its very sweetness is a feeling of liking. When you deeply love someone, it not only tastes sweet, but you like it. The sweetness itself is an affect of the liking, of the loving, of the very feelings themselves: "It's so wonderful; I really like her!" When you think of somebody you really like, you may not even be able to say why she is wonderful. There's just some kind of wonderfulness to her. You find in her a beauty that you can't quite call beauty, because it's more like yummy, sweet, magnificent, exquisite.  All of this brings into your heart a sweetness that feels like an appreciation, a liking, as if that wonderfulness you are feeling were your very own heart. That wonderfulness itself is the liking of the wonderfulness; and that liking of the wonderfulness is that melted sweetness; and that sweetness is itself the softness that is melting into itself.