An alternative experience is that of awareness of one’s presence as the vast crystalline mystery of the absolute, whose surface is a transparent and clear crystalline layer that contains all the forms of manifestation, in all of its dimensions. In this experience it is quite clear that nonconceptual presence or pure awareness is the ground of all manifestation, yet it is external to the absolute. More accurately, the absolute functions as the ground of all reality, including nonconceptual awareness. The absolute is the ground of all grounds, the ultimate ground. In other words, the emptiness of the absolute is the ground of all reality, so all manifest forms, whether relative or essential, are grounded in emptiness. This is quite a paradoxical truth, for it shows that nonbeing is the ground of all being. All forms, regardless of how real or substantial, are grounded in nothing. Such is the objective relation that the ground dimension reveals the absolute to have in relation to all manifestation.

The ground dimension clearly and specifically reveals what ground of Reality means, and what the ultimate ground is. Ground of Reality means what underlies it, what forms its inner constitution, what we find as we penetrate its particular forms. It is what we find as we see beyond the forms, shapes, colors, and qualities. And what we find is the absolute whose essence is unfindability itself. A ground is also what supports the forms of manifestation, without which there will be no appearance of forms. Hence, the ultimate support for all manifest forms is not nonconceptual awareness, but the mysterious emptiness of the absolute. Emptiness, absolute absence, paradoxically supports all presence, all that appears to exist. The absolute dimension shows us that the absolute is the source of all manifestation; the core dimension shows us that the absolute is also its core and inner nature; and the ground dimension reveals to us that the absolute supports all manifestation and grounds it in emptiness.

The next step in integration appears in what we term the ground dimension, where each aspect arises as a faceted diamond of a particular color and quality, which possesses two layers, inner and outer; the inner is the absolute and the outer is nonconceptual awareness. The inner layer is not a spherical darkness but a diamond-shaped black emptiness, of the same shape as the external layer. It is like two concentric diamonds, the inner is constituted from the medium of the absolute and the outer from the medium of nonconceptual presence. The experience of an essential aspect on this dimension is that of being a nonconceptual presence—clear, precise, and objective. There is no conceptualization, no ideas of oneself, just simply being, where being is inseparable from awareness. Yet one experiences one’s nonconceptual presence as grounded in something deeper, vaster, and more mysterious. We experience manifest reality again as a oneness of Being, but it is a nonconceptual oneness, where it is the absence of conceptual partitions, instead of the sense of oneness. At the same time, we are nonconceptually aware of a dark and mysterious ground that underlies this nonconceptual unity of appearance.