To understand will in relation to Being is a very subtle thing. It’s happening all the time. When you move your hand, it’s the action of Being. If you bat your eyelashes, it’s Being. The actions that we have no emotional conflicts with are done with great ease and fluidity by Being. Your mind does not need to be involved with them. We take these actions of Being for granted, and never notice that Being is acting. This acting of Being is also the expression of will. Usually the action of the personality separates our mind from our Being, and then we want to figure out what to do and what not to do. So we are not allowing our Being to actually act. Yet it is acting all the time. The majority of our actions are done by Being. If you allow your identity to be the Being, you’ll see that Being is not separate from the body, or even from the mind, instead it is the very nature of the body, the very nature of the mind, even the very nature of the personality. In Being there is no boundary and no separation. That means the action is coming from the ground, the source, Being, so it is real doing and involves all levels at once, from the bottom up. 

One insight possible at this stage is the experiential recognition that the structure of being a bounded entity is based on identification with the body. The soul begins to see the crystallized nature of this deep conviction that she is the body. However, in the course of penetrating the sense of boundedness through the grace of Being, she is in for a pleasant surprise. As she witnesses the revelation that all forms are forms of love and light, she recognizes that one of these forms is her own body. Her body turns out not to be what she thought it was, not what she was identified with. In effect, she has been identified not with her real body, but with an idea, an image of her body, a reified concept of the real thing. Now her body reveals its own true nature, as a body of light. It glows with the inner luminescence of light, a light that possesses the fluidity and softness of love. 

The last question penetrated closer to the truth, which brings us to the next subject matter. I have described how Brilliancy has an intense luminosity, and also an exquisite smoothness and fluidity. Its presence has a fine, smooth texture. These two—the intense brilliance or luminosity and the exquisite smoothness—give understanding its penetrating capacity. Then we can penetrate deeply, as a surgeon does using a fine laser beam. When we are inquiring, we are holding the content—the various facets of experience—and then interrelating those elements, seeing relationships, and analyzing and synthesizing. But our consciousness not only holds the whole interrelated field, it also sees through things; it sees through the veils, defenses, and resistances to underlying meanings, to underlying parts of our experience. We notice that our perception not only has a wider vision, but also that it can have a penetrating capacity. The penetrating capacity goes directly to the essence of the matter through brilliant illumination that pierces as it illuminates. Our consciousness is so smooth that it can move through little cracks, into tiny, subtle places. Brilliancy can seep into and penetrate those little subtle cracks and allow our consciousness to see things we wouldn’t normally see. 

The inner touch is also necessary for the embodiment of Essence. If you use the other capacities of inner perception but not the inner touch, you won’t be embodying Essence. You will be experiencing it more psychically—perhaps as an image, sound, or smell—in a disembodied fashion. This points to the fact that essential presence, and the presence of the soul itself, has a texture. We say that the soul sometimes feels like a flowing plasma. Plasma is physical; it has substance and texture. When the soul is transformed by an essential state, this texture of the presence may get smoother to the point of complete fluidity, so that it feels just like mercury. At another time, it cleanses all of you and feels like a delicate, pure oil, which is the essential anointing of the soul. The inner touch can become very precise in its discrimination of these textures in the soul. For instance, you can feel the Water Essence—the quality of human vulnerability—as a crystal-clear stream of water washing you from the inside. But you can also feel it on the subtle lataif level as water vapor, on a deeper level in the fuller form of regular water, or on the diamond level, in the solidified form of an ice crystal. You can discriminate all of these experiences just through sensing the different textures with the sense of inner touch. 

When inquiry is open and open ended, it discloses the knowledge that is always available within experience. An open-ended inquiry means that the rigid patterns in our experience can be transformed into fluid patternings of a self-organizing flow. Before we enter into the process of questioning and inquiry, our experience is rigidly patterned; it arises in repetitive, compulsive, obsessive patterns. When we look into and challenge what is determining and fixing these patterns, their rigidity dissolves and our experience starts unfolding in new ways. Even with that dissolution, our experience doesn’t lose its sense of pattern, and this is because pattern is the sense and meaning of experience. We still recognize patterns in our experience, but there is a more fluid and fresh patterning to the flow of experience. It has a fluidity and smoothness, a lightness and spontaneity to it. We feel free. When your experience is in rigid patterns, you are in prison. When your experience flows in fluid patterns, you feel the freedom of experience.

The intelligence of Being does not function in a mechanical way as a computer does—by stringing together perceptions and memories. It is not like artificial intelligence, which is why artificial intelligence will never become real intelligence. There is an innate creativity in the functioning of Brilliancy. Intelligent inquiry possesses an organic, intuitive magic in the way it arrives at insights. As a result, there is always a newness in the experience, and always an efficiency in our way of understanding. The inquiry embodies a lucidity, a fluidity, and a radiance that illuminate experience and make it possible for us to see more directly. Consciousness becomes so luminous that it cannot help but see more intrinsically, more to the core of the matter, always in a very smooth, easy, and lucid way, without effort or method. The more that Brilliancy is present, the more we see directly without having to travel the route of making a series of connections. We are able to bridge big gaps in our understanding of experience without having to go through exhaustive, methodical analysis and correlation. We can jump between places due to the intensity, the fluidity, and the smoothness that is going through our consciousness. It is as though the Brilliancy itself were flowing through our neocortex and leaping across our synapses. In addition, not only is our consciousness clear and transparent from the clarity of Essence, but a radiance from within illuminates and highlights the various associations and connections. Connections are more readily obvious because of the intense light shining through them. 

Another sign of the presence of intelligence has to do with a sense of brilliance. If your mind is operating in an intelligent way, after a while you notice that there is pleasure in your brain, as though the cells themselves were having orgasms. They are illuminating from within, bursting with living intelligence and brightness. And using the intelligence of your mind will feel smooth and pleasurable. Things start to happen easily, and your thoughts, ideas, and perceptions begin to have the smoothness and the freedom of movement through a fluid medium. The operation of intelligence becomes like the flow of mercury. Such smoothness is the basis of the penetrating power of intelligence. This penetrating power has to do with the fluidity and delicacy of the movement and physiognomic properties of intelligence. The capacity to pierce to the heart of the matter is seldom as evident in other aspects as it is in Brilliancy. The presence of intelligence has a delicacy and smoothness that is so refined, so exquisite, and of such gentleness that there is nothing it cannot pierce and penetrate. When your mind or any of your capacities function that way—imbued with intelligence—you feel that you are using yourself correctly, which means the way you are supposed to be using yourself. The power of your cells and the capacity of your mind—to think and decide, to see and act, to discriminate and organize—are working perfectly. There is a sense of perfection, of elegance, of precision, of ease; things feel like they are flowing naturally, in the best way for them to flow. It is similar to the way a brook flows downhill: The water will flow right around any rocks or barriers in the easiest and most efficient way as it continues in its descent. 

So we recognize here the subtle tendency in our consciousness to find a place that is somewhat opaque, somewhat solid, somewhat stable for us to stand on, so our mind can feel a sense of existence and presence. But at some point, that place can become a perch for the ego. Presence can, of course, be experienced as spaciousness, fluidity, radiance, or solidity. It can be all of these things, and it is never just one thing, because it is always changing and moving. But we need to understand what we usually end up doing with the notion of True Nature, of presence. We say that our practice is to be where we are, but we can reify that, too: “Be where I am? I’ve got it now! I know what to do—just find where I am and remain there.” The teaching of being where we are condones that; what’s more, it encourages it. We finally feel good about being able to be where we are, and we are happy to have support to keep doing that. But when we don’t understand how our mind works, we can’t see that this is actually a way to continue being. The part of “to be where we are” that appeals to the ego is “to be,” because that translates to us as, “I am going to continue to be.”  

Brilliancy is a perfection in the sense that it is completely undefiled true nature, just like the Absolute. We experience and recognize this perfection directly, in a positive sense, not in an indirect or negative sense. Because it is qualityless, the Absolute is perfect, but without the feeling or concept of perfection being present. In Brilliancy, perfection is a discriminated specific quality of the Absolute. That is why we consider Brilliancy to be one of the aspects of Essence. The presence of Brilliancy is so fine, so delicate, so subtle, that it is like a substance of utmost refinement, utmost delicacy, utmost smoothness and fluidity. It is like a substance made out of brilliance itself.