Guidance is a way of referring to the discriminating intelligence of this optimizing force of our Being. So experiencing guidance does not mean that you are a child who is going to be taken by the hand from one place or experience to another. Guidance is the accurate discerning of the optimizing direction for experience, moment to moment. It is needed when the soul is not living from her true nature—when she is in the familiar situation of obscuration and distraction. If the soul is operating from her own inherent capacities—from true nature —she will not need guidance for her development. Then unfoldment will happen on its own because that is what an optimizing force means. It is a force within our soul that is intelligent, responsive, and aware. It will respond to things accurately, intelligently, and appropriately to develop the soul in the best way that she can develop. And that is what we want when we seek any kind of guidance—internal or external. Inner guidance means the directing of our unfoldment so that the unfoldment will optimize itself all the way to wholeness. Inner guidance guides the soul in her unfoldment so that she will unfold in the right direction, correctly, toward maximizing and optimizing her life and experience.

The inner guide is a prevalent and powerful notion in contemporary culture. In our teaching, the discriminating intelligence of reality can function as guidance in the sense that it points the way, but it is not somebody or something different from who we are. In other words, guidance is the functioning of our intelligence, of our truth sense, of our heart combined with our mind in a synergistic balance that allows us to see what is happening and what it means, to penetrate the opaqueness of our experience in a way that illuminates it and that reveals further facets of the truth. In this way, this intelligence becomes a functional tool of Total Being in its revelation of the truth.

We have described how this occurs: pure presence with its noetic capacity can manifest coemergent with that of nonconceptual awareness. In other words, the inner guidance of Being can arise as the coemergence of pure awareness and basic knowing. Pure awareness penetrates the preconceptual obscurations, and basic knowing discriminates the specifics as insight. The nonconceptual dimension of the inner guidance challenges and highlights the nonconceptual differentiations in these obscurations, allowing the noetic dimension to discriminate these differentiations. The insight is basic knowledge, but it is a discrimination that nonconceptual differentiation brings into awareness. As the noetic guidance illuminates the obscurations they melt away, and allow the soul to experience herself on the nonconceptual dimension. In reality, essential guidance can operate with all the dimensions of true nature, for it is the expression of true nature. It can operate with one dimension, or with two or more of the dimensions, in coemergence. Depending on the need of the inquiry, one dimension may dominate, and in the gradual inner unfoldment one dimension after another dominates in its functioning. Thus we see how the dimensions of pure presence and pure awareness function conjointly in the inner guidance. When the soul fully understands and integrates the dimension of pure presence, she becomes open to all knowledge, to all the timeless wisdom of Reality. When she attains the dimension of pure awareness, she goes beyond knowledge, and attains nonconceptual freedom. She is now free from the constraints of knowledge. However, if she has been able to realize both dimensions and integrate them in her realization, she will be free to use knowledge without constraints, and without danger of reification. She will be able to recognize concepts and their reifications, to see the usefulness of conceptual knowledge as well as the dangers of the discriminating mind. She is open to knowledge, but is established beyond it, and hence she is not afraid of it and not constrained by it.15 She has attained the station of master of knowledge.

So the Diamond Guidance is the specific manifestation of the Divine Mind arising in our soul as a personal capacity. It is what gives our soul the ability to know exactly what is going on and to understand our experience. Understanding our experience is knowing what it is, directly feeling it, and having insight into that feeling, all as part of the immediate experience. Because it is a reflection, an emanation, or a particularization of the Divine Mind, the Diamond Guidance has the capacity to reveal our experience, to penetrate its obscurations all the way to clarity and truth. I call the Diamond Guidance a vehicle of real knowledge because its specific capacity is to make it possible for the soul to know herself. And if you know yourself, then you know your source, because this source is your ultimate identity.