I said at the beginning of this teaching that it would involve a shift of focus from the experience of the individual soul to the experience of the whole of existence. And when we understand the connection of the soul to the larger perspective, it means that we understand what the boundless dimensions really mean, and that is when we begin to understand what spirituality truly means. We cannot understand spirituality if we don’t understand divinity, if we don’t understand the cosmic being, or the nature of everything. If you only understand yourself as essential nature, you are only just beginning to know spirituality. True spiritual or mystical experience is to experience the nature of everything, which is the same thing as the being of God. That is the work we are doing now. We are not working just so that you feel your essence inside you and resolve your issues and that’s it. That’s what happens at the beginning—and we explored that in the first volume of this love series—but now we’re concerned with the big picture, the whole story. Some teachings try to give you the whole story right from the beginning, but it’s difficult to absorb, except in an intellectual way. In this work we want to learn experientially, little by little, so that you’re gradually learning the teaching and at the same time learning what you yourself are and what reality is.  

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. This penetrating capacity is different from focus. The capacity of focus brings our attention to a single point. It allows us to look at just one element, and everything else becomes background. We stay concentrated, one-pointed; we can see more of the detail. That’s focus. Penetration is a matter of going in: entering deep like an acupuncture needle, seeping in like fine oil, or cutting through like a surgeon’s scalpel. We are not stopped at the surface, at what is presently showing itself; we see past what’s conscious into what’s hidden or buried. Obviously, this capacity is important for understanding our experience, especially when we are trying to see underlying meaning or underlying unity, because to do that, we have to go through many veils. Usually we do that through seeing relationships, by using analysis and synthesis. At those times, Brilliancy gives us the capacity to see underlying unity in a flash. 

As an aspect of essence pushes forward toward consciousness, it acts on the personality. Essence is a force, and the sector of the personality related to the emerging aspect of essence becomes stronger and more forceful in order to be able to resist the emerging essence and to keep it out of consciousness. The very existence of the personality depends on unconsciousness, on maintaining its established patterns and conditioning. The personality does not want to change. As essence emerges, the conflict between essence and personality will be magnified and become more obvious. The conflict between the unconditioned part and the conditioned part becomes the focus of attention. The relevant sector of the personality will manifest more and more strongly now in consciousness, until it becomes imperative for us to look at it and deal with it in a real and effective way. It becomes necessary for us to understand and resolve the issues related to this part of the personality. To avoid or ignore the issues becomes more difficult than to face them. Here, essence acts as a perfect teacher. It does not, like most systems of teaching, try to make us deal with sectors of the personality that we personally experience as syntonic to our wellbeing. It actually disrupts our habitual equilibrium. Forcefully but gently, and in a balanced way, it reveals each sector of the personality as alien and contradictory to our best interests. No human teacher can be so exact, so effective, and so appropriate. 

Pure being remains as the inner constitutive substance of all forms, spiritual and physical. We tend not to be aware of it when we experience these forms, because we are focused exclusively on the features of these forms, to the exclusion of their being, their ontological dimension. When our consciousness is somewhat liberated from this exclusive focus we can discern their ontological nature, their presence. Normally it is easier to become aware of the presence of the spiritual qualities before that of pure presence, because we can recognize the qualities more readily than presence. But since the spiritual qualities are qualities of presence, we can easily discern their presence. This presence is actually pure presence, but we are not discriminating it from the quality it is assuming. In other words, a differentiated aspect is pure presence clothing itself with the garb of a particular quality. In essential experience we experience both the garb and the garbed, the quality and the presence. The presence is pure presence, but we do not see its purity because it is veiled by the quality. The pure presence is always present, cannot not be present, for it is the ground true nature without which there would be no manifestation and no experience. 

As the individual is accepted, loved and welcomed by the universal Love one starts feeling oneself again as a person. One starts becoming conscious of a subtle sense of being an individual. It is similar to the ego sense of individuality, except that there is no contraction. It is a fullness that encompasses all the body, and more. One realizes that one’s whole body is suffused by the tender softness of the conscious presence. Here one realizes one’s personal relation to the Cosmic Consciousness. There is the definite experience of being an individual rooted in the loving presence. There is no sense of boundaries. One is a presence, a personal presence, but with the quality of the Loving Light. Not only does one feel and see the personal loving presence as directly connected to the boundless Cosmic Consciousness, but one also feels oneself to be a personal expression of the divine presence, and still part of it. When there is focus of attention on the personal presence one feels oneself to be an individual continuous with the cosmic presence. When the attention is focused on the cosmic presence one feels oneself to be the divine infinite presence. One is both the infinite and the individual. This is a very beautiful and fulfilled state. One feels oneself as a fullness grounded in the boundless presence. The mind is crystal clear, and one is a rounded fullness, bathed in the delicate tenderness of the conscious Cosmic Presence, and connected to it from one’s depth and center. One feels connected to the Cosmic Presence, supported by it and enveloped by its lovingness. 

The Point gives us the capacity to find the thread and follow it, as we have discussed in chapter 10, “The Personal Thread.” That’s what focus means: At some point we’re able to see what is going on in our experience and to focus on it and follow it. To follow a thread, we need the capacity to focus on the specific meaning of what is going on. And that will always be an unfolding meaning; it’s not just a snapshot. The process of inquiry means that we’re looking at what our consciousness is and asking questions. Some things we see, some things we can’t see. Some things we know, some things we don’t know. Little by little, though, we get a picture that shows us a certain meaning, and then we follow that meaning. We call that following the thread. We don’t just leave that meaning and go with something else. If we do that, the thread is lost, and after a while we have to start all over again. 

So staying with the thread means maintaining a thread of focus. But it’s not a mental focus, it’s a focus of the consciousness of the soul itself, where the soul is focused on the point: “What is the meaning of what’s going on?” What’s happening is that the Point is going through your unfolding experience and revealing what’s going on. And that going through, that path of significance in your experience, we call the thread. This capacity for focus comes from the presence of the Essential Identity—the Point—in our experience, as part of the Diamond Guidance. The way I see it is that the Diamond Guidance is a structure of many different colorful diamond qualities, in the center of which is the Point. The Point goes through the consciousness, and the diamond structure focuses there. It is not that you’re following the Point; the Point is going through and revealing what is going on. So your consciousness is focused on what is being revealed. That’s actually what’s happening, although we don’t always see it that way when we’re inquiring. It’s like a point of light that lights something up as it goes through it. This lighting up of the various experiences begins to compose a thread. As you follow the thread over time, the picture becomes revealed all the way to the essential aspect of Value. Experience becomes the experience of Value itself. That is the essential point, what the meaning is at the essential level. We may continue following the thread further if we don’t stop at the experience of Value. Value will take us to presence, and presence can continue as the central thread. This means that we are now in the second journey. Continuing to follow the essential thread, which is a luminous thread, will eventually take us to a recognition of the essential luminosity penetrating and underlying everything. This is the third journey. 

Understanding arises spontaneously when you let yourself be. The food of experience is presented to you all the time; you don’t have to look for it. It is not possible to be without experience. All that is left is the digestion. You just need to digest the experience, just like after eating your food you do not need to do anything in particular for digestion to happen. Your stomach is there and it is a natural process. You also do not need to do anything to digest your experience; simply allow the digestion of understanding to happen naturally. You do not need to think about it, or figure it out, or seek for a goal called digestion. From this perspective, the Work is not something separate from life or from the world. Understanding is also not separate from the world. It is not something extra that we do, it is not special or additional. It is actually something everyone does, some people more efficiently than others. In the Work we just focus on it. We isolate the process of digestion so that in time we become more efficient. If we become more efficient, there is a chance of greater development and maturity. It is something that everyone is naturally engaged in since it is the living of life itself—the practical, everyday, every-second digestion and absorption of impressions and the learning and growth that result from that. There is no specific experience or state that you need to achieve. Understanding doesn’t require that you have to hunt for certain issues or patterns in you, nor that you have to get rid of them. All experience is food, and if you are really present, you will digest more of that food, faster and more completely. At another time we will address in more detail the process of metabolism in terms of absorption and elimination, but for now we need to understand the basis of it. You can read about this process in the book on the Personal Essence. (See The Pearl Beyond Price, Almaas, 1988)   

The Point provides inquiry with the skill of focusing, of not being distracted, of not going off on tangents. Focused inquiry is the skill of gravitating toward the significance of the situation, of going toward the main point instead of becoming scattered, going off on tangents, and getting excited about one thing or another. It is a particular skill. In some of us, this ability is more developed than in others. Some of us can’t help getting scattered; others go right to the point, getting the insight. But what is the process of finding the point? We have discussed how the Point gives us the capacity to get to the point, to comprehend the heart of the matter and find its meaning. What are the actual ingredients of the focusing skill? Two primary capacities are required: one provided by the Point, the other provided by another aspect, Brilliancy. The essential aspect of Brilliancy provides the capacity to see the totality of a situation, to look with a large perspective, to hold the whole experience. The Point, on the other hand, provides the capacity to hone in, to focus, to zero in. These two interacting capacities need to operate simultaneously so that we can get to the meaning of what’s going on. The Point is a point of presence, and when it is in consciousness, it focuses our attention. The moment the Point manifests, our attention is spontaneously focused in a very powerful way. The Point is a point of singular presence and brilliance, so its presence in our experience naturally focuses our soul. It does this by providing the capacity to focus on all the levels of the soul’s functioning—perception, thinking, feeling, and action. 

What we call knowing our inner experience is nothing but superimposing concepts on our sensations. And as you focus on your experience through the filter of the concept, the sensation will tend to continue in the same way, and become more solid. When the sensation is pain, it tends to persist as we identify it as pain. If it is felt as tension, it continues to be tension, because the mind fixes it as soon as it sees that that is what it is. What would happen to your experience if you changed the names of everything inside you? Could you call those new labels knowledge? What we call inner experience is nothing but the mind, words in the mind that you have learned from others, or out of the dictionary. We’ve been told many times, “What you call this is tension.” After a while, there really is tension. Before you had the word “tension,” there was no tension. God knows what was there. Before you had the word “pain,” who knows what it was—some sort of intense sensation. As you sense yourself, you experience all these sensations inside you now, and the less you use words to describe them the less the demarcation will be there. The form is not as solid, not as definite. This means that the solidity of your knowledge is decreasing, becoming thinner, as you separate your concepts from the experience, because we want to know what the experience is without your ideas about it. You believe you know this world; I am saying, let’s find out. What do you really know about it if you do not use your words? What do you know directly? What is the direct, fresh experience without the past? To say that you know that what you are experiencing now feels like tension, means you are using past knowledge. Your mind is in the past. You are not completely here now; your experience is not completely direct. You are looking at experience through the filter of a concept you learned in the past. What do you really know right now? 

It is up to each of us to decide what values govern our lives. We can allow our lives to be governed by the pursuit of pleasure, avoiding and trying to get rid of difficulties, or we can allow our lives to be focused on loving understanding and truth. If we are going to wait for the pain to disappear before we come to appreciate truth or to love reality, that will rarely happen. You will have problems, issues, conflicts, and misunderstandings in your life, and in your work here. These are to be seen as only part of the picture, not the focus and center of our Work. These things need to be looked at when they present a barrier. Even when you are looking at an issue, it is more to the point to focus on the mechanisms of the mind with an attitude of appreciation for the process of understanding. This focuses on the truth in the issue, rather than on getting rid of the problem. This may seem to be an insignificant or subtle distinction, but it makes a big difference in the outcome of the work. One perspective is alive and dynamic; the other remains boring and static. If you want to live a more fulfilling life, you have to develop a taste for certain values, a taste for truth and understanding, depth and profundity, precision and exquisiteness, dignity and integrity. These refined values are subtle rather than gross. They will lead to a refined human life, infused with natural beauty, colorful and rich. All of these things are present all the time— you don’t have to achieve them, you just need to appreciate them. You need to begin to love them and orient yourself towards them so that you allow yourself the time and opportunity for them to emerge. 

So as I said, one way to get to the experience of the pure state of presence, the already liberated state, is to focus on whatever helps bring you more and more into the here and the now—to disengage from the past and the future and be in the moment. This focus is an important element in our work here, and the techniques of Gestalt therapy can provide an effective entry into the experience of presence. Our work in the Diamond Approach is to understand with appreciation, insight, and deep feeling exactly where we are in the moment as it unfolds. In fact, we need to be completely aware and understanding of where we are at this moment for the unfoldment to occur. You cannot go about this in a theoretical way. To allow your consciousness to unfold—and, by unfolding, to shed all the layers of unclarity—you have to understand where your consciousness is at this very moment. 

The Diamond Approach is a process of experiential inquiry into the self, inviting the self to reveal its truth as a direct living understanding. At some point the inquiry begins to focus naturally on the self-identity structure of the self. For the majority of students, the truth that reveals itself at the beginning is the psychological truth of this ego structure, the psychodynamic processes that express and sustain it, and the personal history that went into its development. This confronts the student with awareness of the environmental factors that caused her narcissism, leading to the challenge and dissolution of the many levels of defense and rigidity in this structure. The inquiry proceeds further into the fundamental factors causing her narcissism. For a long time, she finds the environmental and fundamental factors linked together in a complex, but ultimately comprehensible, manner. We can see the psychodynamic aspect of the work that leads to the realization of the Essential Identity as a regression, or as the retracing of the process of the loss of this self and the development of the shell, as we discussed in the last chapter.

At the beginning of practice, we are usually identified with the individual self and are not yet aware of the force of Living Being that is responsible for realization and for spiritual experience. At the beginning of the path, the enlightenment drive appears to us as our commitment to and interest in practice, as our devotion to and love for the truth and for reality. As our practice matures, not only do we have various openings, insights, and experiences but also we begin to recognize that the arising of the experiences of true nature is what undergirds our practice—not only what motivates it, but also what guides it, and even generates it. We begin experientially to deconstruct the notion of causality. We see that our work doesn’t lead to the arising of aspects and dimensions of true nature, but that the aspects and dimensions themselves lead us to the questions and the issues and the focus that arise in our spiritual process. It is realization that actualizes itself—usually through our practice. So when we are established in the understanding and the certainty that we are not in control of our process, that Being or true nature is actually in charge, then our unfoldment becomes a runaway unfoldment, which means  that everything happens on its own. When we recognize that everything happens on its own, reality begins to unfold consciously on its own, which further intensifies the process. Our process flows from one quality to another, one dimension to another, one insight to another, intensifying and deepening all the time. This is an important juncture in the Diamond Approach. We call it runaway unfoldment, meaning that unfoldment is unstoppable. Our unfoldment is no longer dependent on our practice—rather, it makes our practice happen. 

When we begin to experience consciousness directly, a whole new world opens up. Rather than the normal sense that we are seeing the world as an external object, we begin to perceive the universe from within. The inner journey becomes a journey of discovery that opens us to magnificent, exhilarating inner experiences and perceptions, but also brings our knowledge of the world and of existence into a sharp, clear focus. Inner explorers travel to a world much more exciting and thrilling, much more beautiful and meaningful, much more satisfying and fulfilling, much more amazing and magnificent than any outer explorer will ever behold. Many religious perspectives tend to turn the inner journey into a heavy sanctity, a dull morality, a perverse holiness. Given this tendency, it is no wonder that so many people are no longer interested in religion. But when we explore the soul, rather than leaving it in a static relationship with an external divinity, we penetrate to the ground of the self, to the conscious field of the soul, and begin to know consciousness directly. Then the inner reality becomes a delight and a wonder, and we approach more and more closely a lived understanding of the relationship of our soul to what has been thought of as the divine; thus we approach an appreciation of the source of all discovery and creativity. 

What we do here is look at the barriers that you bring to work on in this group. We dismantle them, analyze them, examine where they come from in terms of your childhood and your relationships and your life in the world now. From that material, we eventually get the real and precious metal—or the gems hidden inside it. That’s why all that stuff was there. You think that by working on your issue of independence you’ll finally be independent, you’ll be able to support yourself, earn a lot of money, do what you want and all of that. That’s all true, but it’s not the most important factor. The most important aspect of working on any issue is for something inside you to develop. The rest will follow almost effortlessly. So, we’re talking about being “in the world but not of it.” All of us here live in the world and do what everybody else does: we wear clothes, eat food, go to the grocery store, have a job, make love, fight, everything. However, our focus is different. We do not identify with the part of us that eats, shops, works, and so on. We learn to develop the capacity to be aware of what is happening but not to identify with it; we develop what we call awareness and disidentification. These are the most important things you need in order to do the work of understanding yourself. You have to be aware of what’s happening inside of you and outside of you. The world is seen as a big classroom; the situations are classes where you can develop certain aspects of yourself, certain aspects of your essence. The whole world is a big university offering many classes: classes on sex, classes on work, relationships, dependence and independence, and so on. Little by little, we become aware of our life with all of its conflicts and barriers without totally believing that this is all there is. The more we’re able to pay attention and disidentify, the more we’ll be able to see the real truth that is there like veins of gold in piles of rocks. The truth is the gold in the ore. Developing this capacity to pay attention and to disidentify at the same time ultimately leads us to experience our essence. 

Here it is not a matter of discovering new aspects of essence. It is a matter of letting go of the ego identity and living from the essence that is already present. In this phase of the work, everything becomes an object of study and understanding. It is no more an inner process. One's life, with all its situations, comes into focus. One's style of life—how one leads one's life in all its aspects—becomes understood and modified accordingly. The individual becomes aware of his environment and ascertains whether it supports or inhibits the life of essence. One's relationships to other people, intimate, sexual, social, and professional, all become clear and objective. Everything, every part of one's life, inner or outer, becomes conscious, no longer under the sway of the unconscious. This is a very deep and involved work. It leads to responsibility and maturity. It would be almost impossible to carry out this deep work if it were not for the presence of essence, with its penetrating power. Most of the unconscious material at this phase relates to the early months of life and even before that. It is material that is considered preverbal and, in fact, pre-personality. The mind cannot function at such depth. Only penetrating intuition and direct perception can be used effectively at such a level of work. Essence does penetrate to these deep strata of the personality. It exposes them to the light of understanding.