In the Diamond Approach, we use these various techniques to find out exactly what emotional conflicts contributed to the loss of a particular quality of Essence. We then go right into the emptiness itself. This makes it possible to remember the aspect that was lost. It never fails. For example, we have seen time and again in our work that everyone who deals with her attachment to her mother and goes all the way into the feelings of need, longing, and hurt will ultimately get into what we call the Merging quality of Essence. It’s a wonderful merging kind of love where you lose your boundaries and merge with everything. So you see that although we accomplish the tasks of psychotherapy in the course of doing this Work, our interest is not in psychotherapy. Our interest is in the Work. Without actually doing the work on Essence, there is no resolution to our suffering and no opportunity to realize our true nature. 

Grandiosity is mainly a defense against deep hurt and vulnerability. This is the same hurt and vulnerability that the ego ideal hides, which is the hurt of the absence of self and value. One way people become grandiose is having inadequate external guidance in childhood. To survive they had to believe they knew who they were and what to do, because they had no support from the outside. This means that breaking through the grandiosity will bring out the insecurity of having no support, the sense that there is nothing there to help. 

We are talking about mystical poverty because this perspective is needed in our work here. We are not working to get richer; we are working to get poorer. You might think you are coming here to get more realized, to achieve more essential states. The truth is you will have less and less. The heart and the mind usually do not hear this message for years and years. They keep rebelling, keep doing things according to what they have learned. “I don’t want this. I want that.” After some long time, the heart and the mind become wiser. The heart sees, responds, and moves toward poverty. The heart realizes that riches hurt, that they are not the real thing, not the truth, not the true Beloved. Also, the heart realizes that trying to get riches is not the heart’s nature. Its nature is always surrendering, forgiving, disowning. When you are poor, you don’t feel, “I have achieved poverty.” When you are poor, you don’t have such claims. You don’t come to conclusions about yourself. You don’t say, “Now I am realized. I am loving. I have this or that.” The heart is soft and humble. The soul takes the direction of poverty because she realizes that all that she has tried wasn’t true. She has been pursuing possessions and achievements like a stubborn little kid who doesn’t want to change. The soul comes to see the truth and finally recognizes, “Yes, that is really how it is.” 

The self knows unconsciously, or we could say intuitively, that its identity is the boundless pure Being, but it is still consciously identified with being a separate entity. So even at this level of work, there are often big issues. For example, when this manifestation is arising, and the student is feeling that she is the “most special” or the “only special” one, when anyone else is treated in a special way, she feels hurt and wounded. So she knows she is the most special because she is the purity of Being, but becomes grandiose when she attributes this specialness to her conscious identification of herself as a separate individual. Clearly, the way to work with the situation effectively is not to judge her narcissistic need as grandiose and unrealistic, but to discover in that need information about the true self from which she feels alienated. The narcissistic wound that arises here is for not being seen as the source of everything, of all knowledge, understanding, love, value, preciousness, meaning, and existence. We are hurt about not being recognized as this supreme manifestation of Being, the one most worthy of love and admiration. It also reflects our own incapacity to see our true pure nature, as we are not yet realized at this level. At this juncture, we understand that believing that we are separate individuals, or autonomous entities, rather than recognizing ourselves as the oneness of all existence, creates alienation from pure Being. To take oneself as ultimately a separate and autonomous person creates the supreme wound, which appears as an abyss, an abysmal chasm, that alienates us not only from our true nature, but also from everybody and everything. This is the supreme betrayal, and the beginning of endless suffering.

Upon waking up in the morning, I find my attention riveted by a feeling of hurt in the heart. The hurt is warm and sad. It feels like the heart is wounded in its very flesh. The hurt leads to a gnawing sensation in the mobius, the subtle center at the sternum. The gnawing is painful; it feels physically grating, but also emotionally difficult. A frustrated feeling has become stuck at the lower part of the chest, turning into a gnawing sensation. I feel all this mixed with the feeling of hurt and sadness. I contemplate the hurt, the sadness and the physical contraction. Holding all in awareness, while intimately feeling all of the nuances of the ongoing experience. The contemplating awareness embraces the content of experience with a feeling of warm kindness and with an attitude of curiosity, not knowing what the hurt is about, but interested to find out. The gnawing sensation responds to the motiveless inquiry, and begins to soften as the contraction at the mobius center relaxes, revealing an unexpected element to the sadness: loneliness. The hurt turns out to be the pain of feeling lonely. The feeling of loneliness wets the sadness with more tears, and the hurt expands into an emptiness underlying the sadness. Now it is deep, sad loneliness. 

We see here the plight of the child—his loneliness and isolation and the hopelessness of his position. For the child is still the essence, and regardless of how much the parents love their child, they are bound to misunderstand and suppress his being, the essence. Adults are mostly personality, and no matter how much they try, they will misunderstand and hurt the child's essence. They see reality from the perspective of the personality, and this perspective is based on the absence, not the existence, let alone the importance or the value, of essence. 

I have encountered this shell every time my identity has been challenged by a new manifestation of Being. It indicates the identity of the ego-self, formed by memory and history. In this state I feel phony, not authentically myself. At these junctures the process usually begins with the recognition of being identified with an ego structure, with the attendant shame and deep hurt. This understanding gradually dissolves the shell, and fully reveals the emptiness. The emptiness feels like a state of not knowing myself, of not having a sense of self or identity. Holding this deficient emptiness with motiveless global awareness, allows it to transform to a peaceful black spaciousness. This space, which has no sense of self, and no concern for its absence, allows the new identity to arise. The new identity is usually a certain dimension of Being, which now takes the center of experience. Something different occurs in the experience I am relating, again reminding me never to become smug about what I know, even when it arises from authentic experience. I have learned not to anticipate what will arise, for there is no way to second-guess the action of Being. 

In inquiry, we make them more explicit. First we differentiate the contents of our perception, and then we discriminate what those differences are. For instance, say I’m feeling some kind of emptiness, an open space, and within this space is a delicate atmosphere of warmth. So there’s an emptiness and a subtle presence that feels warm. If I can tell that there is an emptiness or spaciousness, but I cannot separate that from the pervading warmth, I will not be able to know, to fully discriminate, the truth of my experience. And if the warmth has in it some kind of sadness or hurt, without discrimination I won’t know that there is hurt separate from the sensation of warmth. I will experience all of it as one thing. Or perhaps I am able to see that there are differences between elements of my experience, but I don’t know what those differences are. Once again I have no possibility of discovering the truth of my experience. However, if I know that there is space, and that the space has in it a warmth, and the warmth is wrapped around some kind of hurt, then I’m aware of three discriminated elements and can see each one for what it is. If I continue to be aware of these three elements that I have discriminated—in other words, to follow this inquiry—I begin to see how they are related. Experiencing the hurt without doing anything to it allows an emptiness to appear; this becomes the space for a warmth to arise, a warmth that feels like kindness. I begin to see that if I don’t fight the hurt, kindness arises to heal the hurt. That’s an insight. That’s an understanding. 

Let’s look at the implications of this attitude more closely. Something happens and you get angry. What makes you get angry? Would you get angry if you didn’t believe there was a self there to support and protect? What’s the point of getting angry? You get angry only if you feel hurt, insulted, or you didn’t get what you want. Someone is there who believes certain things about himself and has a particular self-image. If that self-image is frustrated, hurt or insulted, there is anger. Would there be anger if there were no self which thinks of itself in a certain way? Look at any suffering you’ve experienced: jealousy, anger, hatred, fear. Isn’t that suffering dependent on the point of view that somebody is there being hurt? Doesn’t the feeling of insult or humiliation mean there’s someone there who has pride? Doesn’t the feeling of frustration mean there is someone there who wants something and is not getting it? Not only do you not see reality as it is, its beauty and its majesty and its grandeur, you are also hemmed in and restricted. Don’t you spend hours and hours ruminating, thinking, proving or disproving that you’re good enough or not good enough, as if there is somebody there who is supposed to be good enough? According to whose standards? Your own! Aren’t you always thinking of what you’re going to get for yourself? 

The basis of hurt is the sense of being cut off from oneself, from one’s own truth. That has to happen first, before you can be hurt in other ways. If you are not cut off from truth, you can’t be truly hurt. But if you are cut off from truth, then you will be hurt by all sorts of things. But those hurts are just provoking the deeper hurt. They’re a reflection of it. That’s really a dilemma in life. What we see is that most people do get hurt by the truth, and so we think the best thing is to cover up the truth, to forget the truth. However, the fact is that the more you see, the more you recognize that it is really the other way around. Although the truth might hurt for a while, seeing the truth will actually eliminate much more hurt in the future. It is a difficult lesson to learn. Learning it brings a kind of maturity. It means that you have to believe and act according to the perception that the loss of truth is really the biggest hurt. 

There’s another interesting relationship between truth, pain, and compassion. Most of you who have learned to experience compassion have seen that it usually opens when you allow yourself to experience pain, and that pain usually comes by seeing the truth about yourself or your situation. When you see the truth, you feel hurt, and when you allow yourself to feel the hurt, compassion comes. If you don’t allow yourself to feel hurt, you can’t feel compassion. That’s how our organism functions. So there is a reciprocal relationship between truth and compassion, and there is a connection between these things and suffering. The suffering is not the point; suffering is something in between that we go through. From the perspective of Essence, it is irrelevant. The important part is truth—the truth about who we are—no matter how much hurt, suffering, and fear it takes to get there. Sometimes the pain is there so that the person will learn the truth. 

In the beginning, people take compassion to mean the feeling of wanting to alleviate the person’s pain or take it away from them. A deeper level of compassion is taking action whether you feel inclined to or not. The third level of compassion could include hurting somebody or not taking their pain away when you see it. Sometimes they need the pain to learn something about themselves. They may need it to learn about compassion. If you take away people’s hurt, they won’t learn how to be compassionate. We also said the most objective compassion has to do with truth. Whether the person feels hurt or doesn’t feel hurt is immaterial. The point is truth, the golden truth. The real energy of compassion toward yourself, the real attitude of trust toward yourself transcends pain and pleasure. It’s truth. What you finally trust is the truth—the truth in yourself, in somebody else, or in the situation. Truth as such. Compassion has to be according to the truth and for the truth. That’s why some actions that come from the deeper level of compassion might not look compassionate to someone else or to the external world. They might even look cruel, yet they might be the most compassionate thing. Often what people want to do in such a case—to act in a way that looks compassionate—is really not compassionate. 

The idea that if we are wronged, we are completely justified in our desire to hurt the other, to get back at and punish that person has been institutionalized in our society. Even nice, ordinary people say, “I can’t rest until I get satisfaction. That man murdered my child, so I have to put him behind bars or in the electric chair. Only then will I be satisfied.” I always wonder why that is satisfying. Where is the satisfaction in killing somebody else or hurting them as much as possible? We think that it will be satisfying because that is what our hatred wants. It is our hatred in action. The only way we believe we can live at peace with ourselves is by eliminating whatever it is that hurt us, whatever caused us misfortune, because we want to get back to that peace of mind, to that nirvana. We want to get rid of it, forget about it, relax, and go on with our lives. So, hatred is pandemic, it is everywhere. We hate others when we feel wronged or frustrated. And what we feel toward others, we inevitably feel toward ourselves. Why is that? If we hate someone else, we are hating the fact that they have hurt, humiliated, or frustrated us. We want to annihilate them so that we will no longer experience these feelings. This means that we actually hate our own feelings that we believe are caused by that person. So hating an object reflects the fact that we hate the feelings that object engenders in us, and hence we hate ourselves.

A primary element in resolving the narcissistic constellation is going through the narcissistic wound and understanding it precisely and objectively. It must be understood, not simply experienced. To understand it means to see how it is related to not having adequate mirroring. Our insight usually begins with seeing the narcissistic issues as they manifest in our present life circumstances, but generally goes on to remembering or re-experiencing the original childhood hurt. We recognize that the hurt is due to losing sight of what is genuine in us, of our precious nature, because it was not supported and mirrored in our early years. We feel hurt that the people in our environment did not see us, did not appreciate our truth, and were not attuned to our true nature. We feel hurt because being ourselves was not appreciated by those we cared about and depended on. As we become aware of this lack of mirroring and support for our true being, we might come to feel abandoned or forsaken. 

We usually experience embarrassment and shame when we begin to feel a narcissistic wound. Narcissistic hurt is a doorway to the insight that there is nothing to our conventional sense of self, that it is fake. We may feel ashamed of ourselves, deficient, worthless, not good enough, “found out” in our unreality. We might feel unimportant and worthless because we are empty of anything real and precious. Naturally, we defend against this wound. Typically, the narcissistic wound arises when we feel not seen or appreciated for who we are; we feel the absence or loss of mirroring for who we take ourselves to be. This wound is connected with the original childhood hurt about not being seen or admired. At the deepest level, however, the narcissistic wound results from the loss of connection with the Essential Identity. The wound first appears as a rip in the shell, in the structure of the self-identity, reflecting the loss of a certain way that we recognize ourselves, often involving the dissolution of a certain self-image. As we experience the wound more deeply, we come closer to an awareness of the deeper loss, the severing of our connection to our Essential Identity. 

The issue of hurt enters when there is work on the truth. The compassion connected to truth is not just the compassion of wanting to help someone alleviate hurt. Compassion, in this case, means having the green center open and trusting the capacity and willingness to experience hurt in order to see the truth. The objective is the truth. Hurt is one of the things you allow yourself to experience because it is needed to be able to see the truth. So when I am compassionate toward you, it is not because I don’t want you to feel hurt. The function of my compassion is to allow you to trust. The trust then allows you to experience your hurt so you can see the truth. Compassion is needed to generate the trust to allow yourself to tolerate the hurt that will help you be and see the truth. The final point is the truth. Only at the most superficial level is compassion for hurt. It is true that compassion relates to hurt, but it is in the service of truth, not in the service of eliminating hurt. 

When we are not in touch with our true nature, the emotional pain of our everyday life can begin to feel intolerable. But the more we recognize ourselves as our true nature, the less significant our emotional pains become. Regardless of how deep the emotional pain goes, our true nature is infinitely deeper. But without access to the depth of who and what we are, intense pain feels overwhelming. It threatens our sense of who we are, so we close down or clam up. Over time, we block the pain by deadening ourselves, by making ourselves insensitive, thick, and gross. Without the soft, radiant warmth of Loving-kindness, we aren’t going to trust enough to open up. Our field of experience needs to have this sensitivity, because we have become insensitive. So if our inquiry is going to invite openness in our experience, it must be open to the possibility of experiencing the pain, hurt, and suffering. It not only has to be open in the sense of allowing the suffering to surface in consciousness, but the openness has to embody a gentleness, delicacy, sensitivity, softness, and considerateness. Only this will truly invite the soul to open up her pain. Simply stated, inquiry requires the presence of Loving-kindness. Our clarity and precision need to embody the sensitivity of kindness to respond to exactly where we are. With Compassion, inquiry considers appropriately—in a very gentle, delicate, selfless way—how we are vulnerable and how we are hurting. So our inquiry must be courageous, curious, and steadfast, but also considerate of the pain and sensitive to our vulnerability. In this way, our soul will feel willing and interested to open up and reveal her hidden pains. This presence of precise and attuned kindness also allows our soul to be touched by the healing element, which is the presence of Loving-kindness—the Green Essence.