Our mind naturally compares whatever we experience with other feelings and other experiences—both our own and those of other people. Perhaps you’re meditating and you start feeling a little bubbling in your belly, something you haven’t experienced before. A neutral response says, “That’s interesting, in contrast to yesterday when there was no bubbling.” However, it is more likely that when you feel the bubbling, you remember your friend who said that when he was meditating the other day, he had this lava flow—intense heat and brightness and a tremendous explosion. And you think, “All I feel is this little bubble? This is all I got? Obviously, what’s happening for me is not it.” Or maybe it changes from a bubble into a big, exploding supernova, and you remember your friend talking about the lava, and you think, “What happened to him is nothing—this is it!” You want to hold on to the experience until you talk to him . . . whose is bigger? That sounds really funny, but it happens all the time. We don’t leave our experience alone. The problem is not the fact that we compare, but that we compare in a judgmental way. Our superego dominates our observations and we end up saying, “This is acceptable, that is not acceptable.” Everything is seen as good or bad, preferable or not, more evolved than someone else’s experience or not, and the result is that we can’t let ourselves be where we are.

Our soul is then not constrained to form herself only into what we think of as a person with arms and legs. Our inner experience can be released from this body image, and we become free to experience ourselves as a flowing river of luminous consciousness, a bright star of presence, a rich planet of life, a rose of love, a lava flow of energy, a night sky of depth, a blue sky of inner rest, and so on. Our feelings are no longer constrained to the ordinary emotions of fear, greed, aggression, sadness, depression, and so on. We can now experience our inner feelings as a bright and happy sun of joy, a solid and stable silver moon of will, a warm honey of fullness, a fresh pool of innocence, and so on. Our mind will be freed from obsessive thoughts and limiting self-images, to manifest diamonds of clarity, jewels of lucidity, gems of insight, scintillating brilliance of knowledge, and so on.

AH comments: This student was afraid to be in his genitals and to feel the fullness and aliveness of his presence there, because of his relation to his father; but he also needed to be strong and masculine for his father. So he developed a character of being strong and masculine but rigid and unfeeling. This structure of his personality is not real but is what he had to be for his father. During his work with me, he experienced this structure as a hard shell in the shape of a penis. His head, which represented knowing, was the tip of the penis shell. By recognizing that it is what he needed to be in his relation to his father, he realized its emptiness: that it is a made-up character, that it is unreal, and is devoid of reality. His act of being present with the emptiness of this shell—and his not going along with his judgments of it—transformed it into a clear spaciousness, which then became filled by the alive fullness that his father rejected in him. This fullness, which gave him the feeling of real completeness, was the presence of Brilliancy. His anger and indignation at his father for castrating him made the Brilliancy mix with the aspect of essential Strength. This mix appeared as a flow of lava, in the sense that it is hot, and white-red. The mix of Brilliancy and the red of essential Strength is the bigness and strength that he was trying to be for his father. Now it is real, because these are the true qualities of his own being.

The subtle capacity of inner seeing is centered in the forehead, and it has many varieties and degrees. When it expresses the level of development of the Diamond Guidance, you realize what I call the diamond eye—objective sight. Just as our physical capacity to see has an extensive range, so does our inner seeing. The range of inner seeing can be so wide that you can see your own inner state or the inner state of somebody else. So for example, you feel the strength of the Red Essence, and you can also see fiery red, or a flame, or liquid fire, or lava. When the Green latifa is present, you can see emerald green or an actual emerald—a shaped, faceted, beautiful emerald of consciousness.