The second journey begins as we learn to recognize Essence, the dimension of essential manifestations of Being. Now we are approaching the farthest reaches of the power drive; we are at the edge of our star system and are beginning to have glimpses of other dimensions of experience. Most of us will need the help of a teacher, the captain of the spaceship, who can take us into the second journey. A teacher helps us to pay attention to and discriminate the subtle and previously unrecognized aspects of our experience that open the door into the realms of essential perception. 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.

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.

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.

With dedicated practice, we can have moments in meditation or inquiry when we move deeply in ourselves, when we go beyond the usual images and emotions and all the content of our personal history. Then it becomes possible to recognize the basis of ego activity itself—that which determines a great deal of our experience. We begin to see directly and explicitly the tendency to take a position and to try to get someplace. We start to see the beliefs and assumptions we have, the subtle attitudes that orient our experience. Even when some of these beliefs are based on real experiences, they block our natural unfoldment because they become solidified as conclusions. Eventually, inquiry moves to a deeper level, where it becomes very subtle and very delicate, where we can see the original manifestations of the ego and its activities. Instead of just seeing the content, we also understand how the ego works. This means that our spaceship has crossed to a parallel universe, as if it had undergone a phase shift. That is when Spacecruiser Inquiry begins to engage the hyperdrive instead of its power drive. By this time, we generally have more peace, quiet, and spaciousness in our inner experience, so it becomes easier to see these subtle discriminations. These initial stirrings of ego are very subtle and underlie all its experiences, identifications, and reactions.

So openness is the basis of inquiry, but love expressed as curiosity specifically invites the Diamond Guidance. This active edge of openness is needed for the truth to be revealed. Then there is joy, curiosity, a happy excitement to find out. The not-knowing becomes the beginning of adventure. And because you don’t know, it is more exciting. Joy is in the whole process, and the excitement of life intensifies. The soul is turned on to exploring the mystery, and it is curiosity that engages the power drive of your spacecruiser. There is a relaxed and spontaneous quality to curiosity. This active participation in the investigation has a playful lightheartedness that expands the love of truth in a more selfless way. Playfulness indicates a lack of purpose even though there can be a committed investigation. Inquiry is thus a mirror of Being’s unfolding, a process that does not follow a predetermined plan—it is spontaneous creativity.

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.

So we have three drives that we need to engage as we learn to pilot Spacecruiser Inquiry: the power drive, the hyperdrive, and the superluminal drive. In the beginning, we need to learn how to engage the power drive and the hyperdrive. These two drives are related, and we can see this by addressing the question of what motivates inquiry. Motivation fuels the driving force of inquiry. This motivation, which is Essence and openness, develops and transforms as we go through the three journeys. The specific way that Essence functions in the power drive is through the love of truth for its own sake. What does this mean? Inquiry proceeds by being guided by the truth. In fact, inquiry can only proceed on the basis of finding the truth; there is no other way of inquiring. When we inquire, we investigate to find out what the truth of a situation is. We do not try to change anything, we simply work on opening the situation by inquiring into it until it reveals its meaning. So inquiry is basically an investigation to apprehend the truth, the meaning, of what is going on. Frequently, the truth is hidden or not seen, or is distorted by our positions, beliefs, and identifications. We want to see through all that fog to find out what is actually happening.

The supports for this personal exploration are the awareness practices of concentration and mindfulness. In concentration, we learn to focus and sustain our attention on our present experience without allowing habitual distraction from our mind. If we cannot do this, we will never be able to concentrate our energies to break out of familiar orbits of consciousness. At the same time, we must learn mindfulness, which means expanding our awareness to include as much of what is present in our experiential field as possible. In perceiving more, we learn to challenge our conditioned beliefs about what is important in our experience and what is not. This will introduce new elements into our perception and juxtapose things that would never have appeared connected in our normal frame of mind. These two capacities of concentration and mindfulness are central to the power drive and implicit in the more advanced drives.

However, at the beginning of the inner journey, we find ourselves earthbound, gravity-bound, caught in an inertial orbit. We are stuck within unchanging patterns, going around and around the same experiences, perceptions, and knowledge. Inertial orbits do not need any power; these habitual behaviors just keep on going, fueled by energy generated from the momentum of our conditioning, which is the gravity that is always pulling us to return to the same terrain. So first our spaceship needs to be able to disengage from the gravity that keeps us in the static orbit of habitual experience. It needs to be able to reach other orbits—thereby expanding our range of normal experience—and then travel to other areas within the same star system. For our vehicle to be able to travel freely within the same star system, we need an appropriate driving mechanism. We need to have a drive that can power our spaceship and give it the necessary escape velocity—the power drive. In science fiction, the power drive (also called impulse power) is used for traveling between planets or around Earth, in what is considered regular space travel. When we are journeying using the power drive, we continue in the same dimension of reality we are already familiar with, but are able to experience different domains within it. For example, experiencing the unconscious dynamics underlying our normal feelings and actions is part of the first journey. Inquiry propelled by the power drive is space travel in which the normal concepts of time and space still operate. We are still in normal reality, and within that reality we are exploring our personality and mind, our patterns and feelings—the various conventional conditions of existence, whether neurotic or normal. This process begins to break the grip of our conventional experience, exposing its limitations, and opens us to the possibility of other dimensions.