When loving to know the truth becomes the specific motivating power for inquiry, the qualities of Essence are able to contribute their specific capacities. These capacities are what fuel the power drive. During the second journey, the openness becomes the inner core of the love, and the hyperdrive engages. It is then that the love becomes coemergent with the mystery. The love of the mystery reveals its mysterious power of revelation and transformation. Loving the truth then becomes a direct manifestation of the openness of Being: It is recognized as the other side of the openness, as its dynamic side. Loving the truth for its own sake continues to be the motivation for inquiry throughout the second journey, but it is now a more primary motivation than during the first journey because it is a love that has as its base the freedom of the openness of Being, and is a direct expression of that openness. The openness eliminates all the boundaries and positions that can limit our love, and it makes that love completely selfless, totally focused on truth. Love of truth here reveals its inner secret, as the love of Being to reveal its mysteries, as the force of the dynamism of Being that reveals the inexhaustibility of its essence.

The intelligence we use in inquiry is the intelligence of the mystery of Being. This essence of Being is the zero that is the source of all infinities, the indeterminacy that is the source of all determinations and discriminations. More specifically, for intelligence to engage the hyperdrive, it has to have as its core the complete openness of indeterminacy, the absolute emptiness of the essence of Being. Otherwise, intelligence will be limited by the various ideas, positions, and concepts in the mind, by our ideas of what can happen and what can be. So intelligence needs to have as its source that indeterminacy, that complete mystery which gives it its maximum power, where intelligence can use all the understanding, all the knowledge we have without limiting the functioning of that intelligence. It can use its power, it can use its compassion, it can use its gentleness or determination, without the limitations of preconceived ideas or already established positions or beliefs about what is supposed to happen. It is completely fluid. So for inquiry to engage the hyperdrive, it has to be powered by the freedom of this nonconceptual openness. This amounts to inquiring without having an identity, since identity is based on the positioning we take. We take a position in order to establish a sense of identity. So not having a position means we cannot have identity. That is why the essence of Being, the Absolute, is the experience of no position.

As we discussed in the last chapter, guidance is a specific expression of the optimizing force of our Being. The direct expression of the optimizing force is the unfoldment itself, the self-revelation of our Being. It is reflected in the way our experience goes from one depth to a greater depth, from one element to a deeper element, from one dimension to a more expanded dimension. Guidance as a specific expression of this optimizing force makes it possible for inquiry—as an evocation of that force—to engage its power drive, hyperdrive, or even the superluminal drive. It is the intelligence of this evolutionary force. Without guidance, there will be changes in our experience, but no optimization. The guidance guides the dynamism so that the dynamism starts going deeper, which means that our spaceship can leave Earth’s orbit and go to other planets. It may even be able to leave the planetary system and travel to another star system. As the dynamism takes the soul into new realms, our Being reveals many pure qualities, which I have called essential aspects. It displays the quality of Love, the quality of Clarity, the quality of Strength, the quality of Peace, the quality of Truth, the quality of Contentment, the quality of Spaciousness, the quality of Existence, the quality of Passion, and so on. These qualities are elements from the beyond, from the unseen world, and our conventional wisdom cannot fathom them, can’t really see or discern their meaning, function, or usefulness.

So, on the second journey, as new dimensions begin to arise, one after another, we need a nonconceptual openness to drive our inquiry. The more freedom we have from concepts, the more profound the openness that powers our inquiry, and so the more we can engage the hyperdrive, allowing a spontaneous and natural flow of revelation. In hyperdrive, the support for this openness with its unfolding flow is the constant practice of presence. Developing this capacity for immediate and direct contact with one’s experience and the understanding of how this contact is available at any time becomes an ever present ground for the open not-knowing that characterizes the second journey.

The hyperdrive can take us through the second journey all the way to the third journey. The third journey is a way of referring to journeying in presence, in nondual reality. With hyperdrive, inquiry is driven or motivated by the openness itself, but traveling the third journey requires the hyperdrive to attain maximum, one hundred percent efficiency and power. This means that inquiry is powered by total openness, absolute openness. In science fiction, this drive is sometimes called the superluminal drive.

Now, this knowingness of our experience in the moment of perceiving it has a profound and unsettling implication if we pay attention. This is the hyperdrive jump that shifts us out of our familiar mind. Usually, we think of our experience in terms of the duality we have developed as the experiencer and the experienced, the perceiver and the perceived. In terms of the example of fear, we would say, “There is fear and there is me perceiving the fear.” We think fear exists someplace on its own, and the perceiver is someplace else, looking and thinking, “Oh look, there is fear.” This is the familiar and assumed position that we are in some separate place of observation viewing the world and our experience. But when you experience fear, are you the perceiver separate from the fear? Remember, we are speaking now about the immediate level of direct perception. Can you ever separate in your experience the perception of the fear from the fear itself? It is not possible. The perception of the fear is the same as the experience of the fear, which is the same as the presence of the fear. It’s as simple as that. The perceiver and the perceived actually exist together as the experience. If we set aside the duality of the perceiver and the perceived, then what is actually there is consciousness aware of itself as fear.

However, the power drive will not be sufficient to take us on the second journey to other star systems or other galaxies. With the power drive, our spaceship cannot exceed the speed of light, and other star systems are tens, hundreds, and thousands of light-years away. Because the power drive operates within regular space-time, we won’t have sufficient time to travel to other galactic systems, or even other star systems, which in our work means to other dimensions of experience. To reach the next level of space travel, we need what science fiction calls the hyperdrive. The hyperdrive is powered not only by the qualities of Essence that are the manifestation of the actuality of Being, but also by the openness characteristic of Being itself. This openness transforms the concepts of time and space, allowing hyperspatial travel, which is space travel outside of ordinary space and ordinary time. Star Trek introduced the term “warp drive” for this mechanism. Warp drive operates according to principles that transcend our usual laws of physics, allowing us to travel at speeds that exceed the speed of light many times over. So the hyperdrive is necessary in order to traverse the vast distances of the second journey, to go to other star systems, even other galaxies. But when you go to another star system, you do not know what kind of reality you will find there, so you cannot go with any preconceived ideas. Having preconceived ideas about what you are going to find will prevent you from reaching another dimension. That is why we need the hyperdrive—which requires us to eliminate all our concepts about what space is, what time is, what reality is, what can happen, what cannot happen—to be able to move to a dimension that is totally new, one we never perceived or even conceived of.

During some stages of the journey, your travel is both spatial and hyperspatial. You alternate: Your power drive serves as the main propulsion system, and once in a while, when your identity is less fixed, you engage the hyperdrive. But as soon as your sense of identity reasserts itself, you have to go back to using the power drive. Then you are once again moving at sublight speeds and your travel is limited within one dimension. In order to reach another dimension, you have to lose your identity, for the fact that you are shifting dimensions means that you have to let go of your position. So the more open we are in our inquiry, and the more open ended the inquiry is, the more we can engage the hyperdrive. The unfoldment of our soul then becomes natural and effortless. We can easily move from one dimension to another, for our mind is not limited by what we believe reality is. Then Being is not coaxed, it just manifests naturally, freely, and we are traveling in complete freedom. In the first journey, when we are still using the power drive, we need to use effort, we need to struggle, we need to discipline ourselves. At that point, inquiry cannot happen except with disciplined determination, commitment, and strength, with the intentional application of our intelligence. We have to use our own power. But when the hyperdrive is engaged, there is a spontaneity and a flow. We do not know where we are going; all movement becomes spontaneous, and our spaceship has become a spacecruiser, enjoying cruising from one star system to another

We have been mostly using our power drive to discuss inquiry; in other words, we have been considering our familiar experience by looking at certain patterns that are revealed through the concept of ordinary knowledge. Now we will shift to hyperdrive to take us beyond the reality we are used to and into a much subtler awareness that challenges our usual assumptions. We need the hyperdrive to jump to this different dimension and understand a different kind of knowledge that we call basic knowledge. The focus of the previous chapter was on how our old knowledge—our ordinary knowledge—patterns, influences, and determines our present experience and how inquiry opens up our present experience by questioning that patterning. We have also discussed briefly how experience in general, even in the moment, is inseparable from knowledge because of the way it is patterned by past experience.

No matter what form inquiry takes, it is always responsive to the unfoldment of Being because it is an invocation of that unfoldment. Inquiry is inseparable in some basic way from the unfoldment. At some point, the inquiry and the unfoldment become one thing: the process of manifestation, of Being manifesting what it loves to manifest. That is the point when you enter into the third journey. When the hyperdrive becomes completely established, your experience becomes an uninterrupted unfoldment in the eternal now. This is what we have called the superluminal drive. We will not discuss the superluminal drive further here. We have mentioned it mostly to give a complete picture of the movement through the three journeys and because it is useful to understand that a form of inquiry is possible that cannot even be called inquiry in the usual sense. When you finally embark on the third journey, that which invites the unfoldment is completely inseparable from the unfoldment itself. This is nondual realization, where experience is pure illumination and unfoldment, where every moment is a spontaneous inquiry, a revelation of the inexhaustibility of Being.