Many of us experience the state of oneness, at least fleetingly. This experience, though profound, is two-dimensional most of the time, in that seeing another person is rather like seeing one cell of an organism where all cells sort of look the same. All is one. The dominant experience is of a unified field of non-separateness. However, when the oneness has the precision of the diamond, what manifests is an added dimension. Everything presents itself in much greater relief; every element of the oneness becomes more uniquely itself. It is true that there is a oneness—a nonduality—but the uniqueness appears very precisely, very clearly. In this state, the other person is a particular person with his own quality, and at the same time he is part and parcel of the oneness of everything. With the precision of diamondness, uniqueness is clear; with the brilliance in the diamond, the oneness is undeniable. Both discrimination and synthesis are operative in this diamond oneness. It is all one unified field, but everything is precisely itself, clearly delineated without being separate. This is the perspective of the Brilliancy diamond as it applies to a deeper experience of realization, that of nonduality.

The field of the soul is subjectively and psychologically consciousness, but phenomenologically this consciousness is presence.

Since the soul is the site and agency of experience then everything that arises in the soul can be seen as part of the soul. Thoughts, images, emotions, feelings, sensations, perceptions, insights, knowledge, and states of consciousness are all the soul. They all arise in the soul as waves in a field, as particular manifestations within it.

The field of the soul is not physical, electromagnetic, or gravitational; rather, it is related to awareness and consciousness. When we recognize the soul we find it to be a locus of consciousness, where this locus is an extended field. The field normally extends through the body, and is often experienced as coextensive with it. However, the field of the soul has no particular shape or size. It is completely formless and amorphous, and can take any shape or form. Depending on the particular state of the soul, this field of consciousness can easily be perceived as bigger, even much bigger than the body, or it can be perceived to be condensed or contracted into a field smaller than the body. The felt sense of the field of the soul usually takes the shape of the body, largely because the soul identifies herself with the body.

We have described the medium or field of the soul as the presence of pure consciousness. In labeling the field "presence" we point to the significant fact that this field constitutes the ontological dimension of the soul. In other words, the existence of the soul turns out not to be only an abstract concept of being, but the direct experiential truth, a palpable presence. This is the reason we frequently refer to this truth as Being, for it is the beingness of the soul. This truth is actually the basic spiritual insight of the inner journey and, in one form or another, common to all major schools of inner work.

We could describe the path toward realization in this way: Our desire to understand where we are and who we are takes us on an initial journey of learning to have more and more insight about our ordinary experience. Gradually, we come to recognize the relationship of ordinary experience to deeper levels of reality—how it reflects True Nature. Eventually, we are able to see how our individual experience is nothing but True Nature, and we move toward the realization of pure Being—the oneness that is nondual reality. This recognition of the nondual ground of experience is the realization that there is basically only presence. Presence is what exists, what is, and everything that exists is a form that presence takes. Reality is one unified field of luminosity that differentiates itself into the various perceptions that we have. Thus, True Nature and Being are really the same thing as truth, or reality. All those terms mean the same thing: presence that is in a condition of conscious full realization. In this condition, experience is not filtered through the mind; things are experienced exactly as they are. We see their nature and recognize that it is True Nature—which turns out to be the nature of everything, all the way down to the tiniest particle. This means that nothing exists but True Nature. It pervades everything so intimately, so completely, that it doesn’t leave any one spot unoccupied by it.

All the properties of the soul are pervasive throughout the field, and her functions can be active at any region of this field. In other words, the soul is holographic -- each region, regardless how small, possesses all the properties and capacities characteristic of the soul as a whole. It is not easy to recognize this, but when we do we are on our way to true inner liberation. The liberation of the self or soul involves recognizing the true nature of the self. This can take place not only through recognition of the most fundamental nature of the soul, such as realization of pure awareness, for instance, but can also be approached by paying attention to and recognizing much more direct and immediate experiential phenomena than are typical of egoic experience.

The ground true nature is one unified field that underlies and constitutes all existence. In itself true nature has no dimensions, no spatial or temporal extensions. Yet because all forms manifest within true nature, we will experience it as a boundless, infinite field of coemergent presence. We perceive the presence of true nature as an infinite field of awareness or consciousness, unbounded and unlimited. True nature in manifestation appears, then, to be omnipresent. It is everywhere, as the indivisible field of presence forming the ground and substance of everything. In self-realization, the soul will experience that she is everywhere, she is everything, she is infinite, she is boundless.