Continual creation is the process through which each object exists. Since objects are not separate from each other, and they all form one continuous spatial tapestry which is the appearance of Being, continual creation is the process by which this appearance changes. All of existence is continually coming into being, where it is always a new existence. The universe is never old; it is always new, for it is renewed instant to instant. This includes absolutely everything. It includes both animate and inanimate objects, the earth and the sky, the planets, the sun and the stars, the galaxies and the space that contains them; it also includes all the thoughts, images, memories, feelings, sensations, and all phenomena at all levels of being. And all of this constitutes one manifold, continuous and continuously coming into being. 

The silence is vast and eerie. There is a sense of ultimacy, of end. It seems that there is nothing beyond it. It is not that the universal witness is the highest. It is beyond high and low. From this silence, the revelation of all essential manifestations of Being arises in a hierarchy within the background of this the vast witnessing awareness. It contains all the levels of Being, so it exists at all the levels. Experiencing the universal witness is not a matter of ascending grades; it is rather an exit, getting out of the whole thing. It is truly the beyond, the unchanging silent background. Its main characteristic is that it is aware. In this way it is similar to the personal witness, where the personal witness seems now to have been a limited and personal manifestation of it. The personal witness is aware of the immediate environment of the location of consciousness, while the universal witness is aware, in addition, of the totality of the universe, as if from above or from afar. This perception does not include all of the details of manifestation, but rather a general perception, as if awareness has receded backward until all that exists is in front of it. Phenomenologically, the perception is of being an endless emptiness, so vast that the whole of existence is a small manifestation within it, seen in general outline as a river of images in constant flux. The awareness is aware of itself as a witnessing of everything without being involved in anything. A dark awareness, but not exactly black. It is more dark gray, the color of the aspect of existence, but it is sheer voidness. It is not no mind space, for although it is beyond thought and mind, mind can exist within it.

Our view, which reflects our experience, is that Being is inherently a unity, a nondual presence that contains no levels, but that it can manifest itself in levels and dimensions experienced as true and objective in their own sphere of experience. In other words, experience indicates that Being manifests itself in various degrees of subtlety and completeness, and these manifestations appear as levels and dimensions of Being, objective and valid on their own levels. More accurately, experience indicates that Being can and does manifest in different levels and dimensions, but that upon analysis of these experiences, we can see they are merely different degrees of subtlety of the experience of the same nature. We do not take the position of accepting either experience or analysis as the final arbiter of ultimate truth, and hence, find no incentive to engage in this ancient debate. We find that each view has its own merits in terms of the work of self-realization, and thus we use them appropriately depending on the degree of maturity of the student. More specifically, we find in our work with students that the perspective of levels and dimensions is helpful most of the time, but that the perspective of a true nature transcending all experience of levels becomes most helpful at the deepest stages of work. 

Only when developmental psychology takes into consideration the fact that the nature of man is Being will a true understanding of autonomy emerge. Again we note that its perspective is not incorrect, only limited. (A similar limitation is seen sometimes on the side of the man of spirit. Some people actually seek out the impersonal levels of Being in order to avoid dealing with the issues of autonomy which must be faced in ordinary ego development as well as in the development of the Personal Essence.) When one does have the experience of ceasing to identify with the self-image and simply being, it is clear that the autonomy of ego is a sham, since the ego personality is perceived not only as ephemeral, a kind of surface phenomenon which is in the nature of an idea, but also as reactive, responding automatically to the world. From Being, which is felt as the true and solid reality, ego’s individuality is seen as simply a dark network composed of beliefs in the mind and patterns of tension in the body. Thus the supposed autonomy of ego is, from this perspective, nothing but the feeling that accompanies an image in its relation to another image. It is striking that this is exactly what object relations theory states: that autonomy is based on the establishment of a self-image. We wonder how one can know that what he believes he is, is simply an image, and stop at that, without feeling that something is not right? 

Our observation is that nonduality is the experience of many levels of presentation of Being. We can experience nondual presence that is pure Being, or the nonconceptual reality, or the absolute truth. Also, on any of these levels there is a continuous gradation of dominance of presence or clarity on the one hand, and emptiness on the other. One can experience mostly the fullness of presence or the openness of emptiness, without losing the other quality. This is most clear in the case of the Absolute, where we experience this crystalline emptiness coemergent with pure Being or nonconceptual reality. Then we can experience a nondual presence that is a pure presence of fullness, or a nonconceptual clarity, totally inseparable from the crystalline voidness of the Absolute. We then know ourselves as the Absolute, which is total cessation, but which manifests clarity by its sheer radiance. This clarity changes from a fullness and solidity to the most subtle shimmering. In all these transformations of radiance there is a constant, the mysterious Absolute Essence. The Absolute is unchanging, but its radiance is in a constant state of dynamic transformation. The radiance is not apart of the Absolute, but totally coextensive with it. So the Absolute is the absolutely unchanging, while it never ceases to change. 

The perception deepens into the understanding that not only am I enmeshed, some important aspect of me is actually lost in this involvement in my life. Understanding bequeaths its offspring: the action of Being in the direction of optimizing its presentations, here activating Being in its tendency to maximize personal experience. As usual, understanding opens consciousness to deeper and more expanded levels of Being. Experientially, understanding manifests at this point as the intensification of the glittering throbbing at the center of the forehead, while the action of Being manifests as the unfoldment of conscious experience into new presentations. This arises now as a feeling, unbidden, of wanting to be free from all this personal life. I am aware of intuiting myself to be beyond all personal life, and of wanting this truth to come to some experiential fruition. Although I am aware of wanting something beyond this experience, I do not reject the perception of the experience of the personal life; thus the experience shifts from awareness of wanting more to a clearer perception of what is actually here in my experience. I can feel the totality of this life, my life: its present, past and future. It feels distinct and separate from who I am. The throbbing at the forehead develops into a sense of expanded clarity: I realize that there is usually the tendency to use all this content of the experience of my life to define me. This content limits not only what I experience, but also, and most importantly, the experience of who and what I am. This is particularly obvious in the case of thoughts, for I see that I can think only along certain lines. Although I might have many new thoughts and ideas, the general mental atmosphere remains the same. I see that the mind flows in predetermined grooves, where change is only a matter of the widening or narrowing of these grooves. 

When the merging gold is absent, we are in the state that we experience as being lonely. Conversely, when we experience ourselves as alone, and that aloneness feels sad and lonely rather than full and peaceful, the aloneness is being experienced as the absence of merging gold. Initially, the absence of the dual unity, the absence of relationship, of connection, of merging gold, is felt as loneliness. As you do your inner work and experience yourself on the deeper levels of Being and essence, you start to become more able to be. And you recognize beingness as a state of aloneness, because it doesn't have object relations, it doesn't have mental or emotional connections with people. You are free within—you are just with yourself inside, with nobody else attached to you in your mind. That's why it's experienced as aloneness. But it's not aloneness that is experienced as being separate from others; it's aloneness in the sense that it is pure, free from contaminations, free from inner dialogues. You're not conversing in your mind with somebody else. You're alone. You are as you are.  For a long time, this aloneness seems difficult to tolerate. Even though it is a state of Being and essence, it is hard to stay with it, because every time it arises, we think that something is missing. So aloneness is not experienced simply as aloneness—a loneliness comes with it. Fear can accompany it as well, and a sense of deficiency. Every time we feel alone—though it might actually be a state of fullness—the mind thinks, "It must be that I’m rejected. No one wants me. Otherwise, why would I be alone?"  So we find one of the issues for merging gold is that the aloneness—which actually is a state of fullness, a state of being—is experienced as a sadness or a loneliness because we cannot conceive of the merging gold in any other way than as a dual unity. Thus we don't allow ourselves to experience the merging gold when we are alone. 

The organs of perception are, in fact, parts of essence; they are its organs and capacities. So when essence is cut off, the fuel of these capacities is gone, their light is dimmed, and most often goes out. The person loses not only his essence, but also his various subtle capacities and organs of perception and inner action. These organs or capacities are connected to various energetic centers in the body that animate both the body and the mind. There are many and various centers as we discussed in Chapter Two, operating at different depths of the organism. There is the level of the chakras, which are centers connected to the various plexi of the nervous system. There is the deeper level of the lataif, which has some connection to the glandular system. There is the level that Gurdjieff used, the three centers in the belly, heart, and head. And there are other deeper levels of centers, which are invisible except to essence. To repress the essence completely and efficiently, these energetic and subtle centers have to be shut off, or at most allowed to operate at a minimum of activity and most of the time in distorted and unbalanced ways. This leads to an overall desensitization and deadening of the body and its senses and to the narrowing and rigidifying of the mind and its activities. The person who knows only personality is not aware of how insensitive and callous he is. This is because he is not aware of how sensitive and refined he could be. He is not aware of how subtle, delicate, and clear his perceptions and actions could be. From the perspective of essence he is a brute, without sensitivity. 

Discrete objects with various kinds and levels of connectedness are the perspective of physical reality. But when we see the truth of the whole perception, see things as they are, we realize that everything and everybody is a manifestation of one thing—waves of one ocean. There’s no such thing as one wave. Can there be a single wave without an ocean? You can visualize it, you can draw it, but in reality there’s no such thing. Neither you nor God is separate from anything else. But that doesn’t mean everything is connected to everything else through umbilical cords. There are no umbilical cords, because there are no boundaries. What is a boundary? Boundaries assume that our usual perception of physical objects determines reality. The physical world appears like reality separated into bounded objects. But if we perceive more than three dimensions—if we perceive the fourth dimension of Being—we realize that everything is made of one thing. One substance. One living fullness. One reality. One truth. So the Basic Fault is seeing things from the perspective of object relations, as discrete entities with fixed boundaries. The perception that there isn’t separateness, that there isn’t discreteness in the way we usually think of it, corrects the Basic Fault. Although discreteness exists, it is a paradox. 

I see that the absolute has a luminosity, a clarity, but not the same as clear light or pure presence. Clear light is colorless, transparent luminosity, a very light and delicate presence. Pure presence is also colorless and transparent, but with a sense of fullness. These levels of consciousness can apprehend the absolute, and can be manifest by the absolute as the ground of all appearance. Yet the clarity and luminosity of the absolute are even subtler than these very subtle forms of consciousness. Its clarity and luminosity are implicit, not manifest. Its blackness is not the absence of light, but its source. The inherent clarity of the absolute is prior to light. There is complete absence of obscurations. The fact that it is nonbeing makes it totally transparent, without this transparency appearing as clear light. But since, on the other hand, the absolute is not a vacant emptiness, but what truly is, this transparency becomes awareness. The awareness of its facticity is then inherent in the reality of its facticity. This inherent clarity of the absolute is its own intrinsic knowingness. Its facticity is inherently knowing. I experience this knowing as an implicit clear light, not differentiated as clear light, but which can plumb the depths of the absolute. It is a clear consciousness completely inseparable from the absolute.

But if you think further, you realize that there are things that are not explained by thinking of yourself merely as a physical organism. How can this body, this physical thing, have dreams at night? When you are dreaming at night and you are walking in your dream and talking to people, it seems real. You feel things. You sense things. Everything is as real as it is now. How does that happen? Something in your mind can create a reality out of nothing. You are in bed. You are doing nothing. But in your experience there is a whole universe you’ve created that is exactly like this universe. But when you wake up, you say, “Oh, that was just a dream. This is the real thing.” How do you know? If we have the capacity to create a dream and live in a dream in which everything feels real, then we have the capacity to create what we are doing right now. Maybe we are creating sitting here together just as we create our dreams in sleep. One of the perceptions that a person has at deeper levels of consciousness is the realization that all of reality is a manifestation of the mind. It is amazing to contemplate that this whole universe is actually created from the very stuff of your consciousness. 

The development of consciousness has to do with living in this life from the perspective of the Absolute. The Personal Essence, the Pearl Beyond Price, has to do with being a human being and still being the Absolute. If you’re just the Absolute, you are not a human being. But you live in this world, you have a physical body and a mind, you have work and relationships. You need the Personal Essence in order to be able to live personally as a human being and still be the Absolute. So the development of the personal aspect has to do with integrating all of these things that are important for our life into the various levels of consciousness, and then into the Absolute. This is an actual process that has to do with the metabolism of the Absolute into the Personal Essence. Although it is rarely mentioned in spiritual literature, the integration of the person into the Absolute is vital because we live in the world and not in a monastery or cave. 

When the individual understands that the deficient emptiness is the same as the feeling of the absence or loss of a certain facet of Being, it automatically and spontaneously leads to the experience of space with its lightness and expansiveness. In our case histories the deficient emptiness appears as the genital hole primarily because we were focused on the clear space, the first grade of emptiness (see Part IV). This grade of space, the clear emptiness, is the most external and so deals with the most superficial layers of the self-image, which include sexual body-image. Dealing with the deeper spaces will lead to deeper levels of deficient emptiness, similar to those of the schizoid and narcissistic structures. The emergence of these spaces can then lead to the various aspects of Being, as we have seen in the case of the merging golden love. 

If there is something arising from within you that is natural and spontaneous and deep, that is not seeking. Your being can flow in a certain direction, and be acting, without it being ego activity. Ego activity is split from being. Being does not function according to what your mind says: “You shouldn’t do this, you shouldn’t do that. This is good or this is bad.” That position of judging how things should be leads to seeking and searching. On the other hand, sometimes your energy, your own being, flows in a certain channel in a spontaneous, effortless flow. In this flow there is no seeking. A great deal of knowledge and understanding can arise out of such authentic activity, and become integrated as true understanding. This is why two people can read a book and understand it at different levels of depth. The difference is not that one is smarter, but that he is really into it—the impulse towards the understanding comes from his heart. It is not because he is going to know more or become more successful. Most of what I have read, I read for no apparent purpose. I didn’t know where it was going to lead; I was just interested. I learned a lot from books that way. 

An infant does not relate to its mother as a person at first. His love starts on the universal level, and little by little it develops into a personal relationship, to the specific recognition, “I love my mother.” Or, usually later, “I love my sister” or “I love my father” or ”I love my teddy bear.” Before that, the baby is like a big wave of pink, flailing around every time it gets tickled or cuddled. A baby doesn't know whether he is loving or not; it just feels good to wiggle around. We say that the baby is cute and loving, but he isn't really loving anything or anyone in particular. The capacity for personalness arrives gradually and goes through many levels of development, beginning at the ego level. The baby starts to recognize himself as an individual and realizes that there are other individuals, that it is not all one tapestry; specific manifestations begin to arise out of the tapestry of universal love. He discovers that it has a design and that he can focus on particular parts of that design. And of course, one of the first designs that emerges out of the tapestry is mother—her face or her gestalt.  This first development of personal love is what is usually called in psychological language “object love.” Object love is a development of personal love understood as being important for having an intimate relationship with another human being. To have an intimate love relationship, one needs to have developed personal love at least to the extent of object love. 

It does appear paradoxical. It is true, there is a development, a person has to go through the different layers and levels of development, but that’s the process of running in place. We believe we’re going somewhere. We think we’re getting love, or we’re getting this or that. That’s fine, that’s as far as we could see. It is possible to work on yourself in developing the different parts, satisfying the various needs. These things need to be done, but if they are done within the context of a larger view, then we do not waste our time—it is more efficient. It is true that for someone who never felt love, it would be hard for them to let go of the need for love. It is much easier for a person to let go of the need for love when they have experienced it. When a person knows love completely and embodies it, the next step is to let go of it. That is the natural process. It is the same thing when you realize that the various levels of realization are nothing but a process of actualizing the concepts of the mind. You actualize love; you actualize success; you actualize happiness; you actualize this and that. Every time you actualize something completely, when you really have it, that’s when you realize that it is really an idea in your mind. You cannot tell before that; only when you have it completely can you see that it is an idea. The moment you know that it is an idea—pop—it is gone. Then the next one comes and you seek it and you actualize it, and when it is completely there—pop—it is gone. The need for love goes, but you continue to be a source of love, without even thinking about it. 

The different levels of Diamond Will correspond to different levels of essential identity. The first level corresponds to the Essential Identity, which is the identity for differentiated self. For most children, the idealized selfobject is the father, as we saw in most of the cases above. The next level of identity is related to experiencing ourselves as Being that is boundless and infinite. It is the self-realization of Being, on the cosmic level, where one recognizes Being, and hence, one’s true identity, to be the undifferentiated unity of all existence. For most students, the childhood idealized selfobject relating to this realization is the mother of symbiosis, or more accurately, the mother of Mahler’s dual unity. The next level of support, the Nonconceptual Diamond Will, relates to the identity with Being as a nonconceptual truth, and so on. This ultimately leads to the Nondual Diamond Will, which relates to the nondual presence as our identity, and this is the true self that transforms what we have called oral narcissism. 

The progressive view that I have articulated in previous teachings and books—understanding liberation in terms of levels and degrees, in terms of processes and developments, in terms of dimensions and ultimate grounds—is only one way of perceiving inner work. In this book, I am going to present a larger, nonhierarchical view that holds the progressive view and also much more. The nonhierarchical view does hold the entirety of the teaching of the Diamond Approach that has thus far been articulated, but only as one kind of realization, only as one way of knowing and living reality. The nonhierarchical view is in no way a break with what has come before; rather, I am simply following the natural implications of the teaching as we have known it. This new articulation reflects aspects of the teaching that I haven’t yet addressed directly or publicly. It turns out to be an entirely different paradigm from what we have been working with for the past thirty years or so. But, as we know from previous developments in the teaching, the new paradigm not only includes what has gone before but also depends on it. That is to say, everything we have done so far—all our practices and our learning—has been necessary to clarify our consciousness and to penetrate the essence of reality, which opens the possibility of waking up to this new view. It is as we move toward living and expressing our realization—instead of just discovering and abiding in it—that we begin to discern these new possibilities. How does reality manifest itself in action, in expression? How does realization live? If life is the life of reality, does a human life still have meaning? What is the point of the particular individual? 

To effectively and fully operate using the Diamond Guidance, we need to be able to function on all levels of discrimination. It is important to have intellectual discrimination, for example, not because we are primarily intellectual, but because intellectual discrimination is necessary for describing a feeling, a sensed discrimination, or a perceived one. It is also necessary to have emotional and sensate discrimination to appreciate the subtleties in our lived experience. The Diamond Guidance, in the arising of basic knowledge, gives us the discrimination on the essential level—the spiritual level—but it also sharpens our discrimination on all the other levels, because it is the prototype, the Platonic form, of the capacity for discrimination in general. We have already discussed how the Diamond Guidance gives us the capacity for objective understanding. Objective understanding is the felt sense of the pattern of meaning in our experience. Since our experience is continually unfolding, understanding is not a static thing but an unfolding pattern of meaningfulness. This meaningfulness can be expressed in concepts and words that we take from our ordinary knowledge; nevertheless, it is independent of ordinary knowledge. Objective understanding is the flow or stream of real knowledge. The flow of new experience is unfoldment, but understanding is the flow of meaning in this unfoldment, which is inseparable from the unfolding experience itself. Objective understanding is a diamond flow. 

There exists only one empty shell that returns with deeper, more primitive, and fundamental layers of its structure every time that Being presents itself in a subtler manifestation. This is in accord with the formulations of object relations theory, which views each psychic structure as composed of many representations, from various stages of development, integrated as a cohesive whole. Investigating such a structure means it will reveal its constituent representations. When we investigate the self-identity structure, these appear as different levels of the empty shell. 

The final outcome of the process of disidentification is the experience of the dissolution of the psychic structure or self-image. This is the experience of space, of what is sometimes called the void—when self-image is dissolved, the person will experience the loss of boundaries, both physical and mental. The nature of the mind is then revealed as an emptiness, a void, an immaculately empty space. The void and the absence of the identifications that form the psychic structure are the same thing. There are various depths and levels of empty space. We can say that the beginning of the void is the absence of identification with the self-image. There is self-image but here is no identification with it. What results is the inner sense of expansion and spaciousness. Then, at a deeper level, the self-image is gone, dissolved. There is only the experience of empty open space, which is boundless, clear, and crisp. The focus is not on the content of the mind but on the spacious emptiness that is its nature. However, this is not yet the deepest level. There might still be identification with an image, but unconsciously. Parts of the self-image might remain in the unconscious. These will surface, in time, and the experience of space will be lost. Disidentifying with these aspects of the self-image until they dissolve will deepen the experience of space. 

The realm of noetic forms is the realm of the manifestation of what is, independent of our definitions or our prejudices. Our learned definitions and our emotional prejudices determine which elements we pay attention to and recognize. These factors determine the content of personal concepts, of mental images of ourselves and others and of the world. Thus the content of our personal concepts can change. We are traversing quite a territory today. So far we have elucidated the difference between the nonconceptual and the conceptual, the realms where there are no concepts, where there are concepts, and where concepts are possible. Here we are describing the realm of objective reality, things that actually exist. This realm has many levels, from pure Beingness to other levels of Essence, all the way to the physical levels. These are the gradations of reality. We can experience everything as beingness, but at the same time perceive that beingness as differentiated. The chair is beingness, the glass is beingness, the rug is beingness. They are all one beingness, differentiated. What is this territory we are exploring? The totality of all that exists, with all this variation, is the Universal Mind, or Nous. The Nous includes everything that exists in reality, with all the differentiations. It includes everything that can be perceived or experienced, and anything that can be conceptualized. What we call in our Work the Diamond Guidance is the Nous on the level of Essence, the manifestation which allows the individual soul to be affected by the Nous. The Nameless or nonconceptual is beyond the Nous; it is the ground of the Nous, which wouldn’t exist without it. The Nameless is beyond mind, and the Absolute is beyond that. 

This sort of experience reflects the freeing and development of various states and qualities of Essence by working through the psychological issues associated with them. Because the content of the unconscious issues is, by definition, unknown to our conscious minds, and because the different levels of Essence are not only unknown but unimaginable to the personality, having expectations or preferences about what will happen next can only interfere with the process of freeing our essence. The process of essential development has its own logic, which you can discover only as it happens. You might find out that if you allow yourself to be nothing, suddenly that nothing becomes a different something. So you’re no longer the planets, or the apricots, or the stars; you’re a totally different universe. You might find that you are a certain kind of planet that becomes a different kind of planet, and the planet is made out of diamonds. It’s not a planet we know anything about. Suddenly everything is diamonds; even the trees are made out of diamonds. You look at the people and they don’t look like people; they look like shiny eggs walking around. Now, how would you know that from the beginning? I’m not saying these particular things will happen. I’m trying to eliminate the ideas and barriers in your mind to allow for possibilities that you cannot conceive of. There is no way for you to conceive of these things as long as you are set in a particular place. To allow the process of growth, you need to allow that anything is possible. Anything can happen. You don’t know what it will be. There is no way for you to know the next step. If you try to direct it in any way, you’re just going to stop it. You can only be yourself, be what you are now, and allow the next moment to unfold. After all, the core of life is a mystery. 

When you recognize your ego ideal and also recognize the essential aspect in it, what I call your particular “channel” opens. Your channel has levels of the essential quality which you don’t recognize immediately; these levels manifest as part of a process. For instance, if a person idealizes strength, there are many qualities in the strength. Ultimately, it becomes the “red channel,” which manifests as strength and power, and then as a sense of vitality and expansion. This develops into a lustiness, and as the red energy expands, it becomes passionate love. Passion is idealized. As this expands, there is an idealization of beauty. The red channel is the channel of beauty. You’re not only powerful and expansive, you see and appreciate beauty—a glamorous kind of beauty—a beauty full of vitality and colors. When you recognize the ego ideal, instead of having something to accomplish, you then have a special contribution that is an outflow of who you are. This can happen only by exposing the ego ideal, not by living according to it.

This characteristic of intrinsic discrimination inherent in the dimension of essential presence forms the prototypical ground for the self’s capacity for discrimination on all levels of experience. It provides the self with the possibility for understanding on its various levels of experience. It is actually this inherent characteristic of our true nature that makes it possible for us to realize this true nature. In other words, it provides the self-existing and intrinsic discrimination in the innermost dimension of experience that appears to us on the various levels of experience as the deeper discrimination. This makes it possible for us to go deeper in our experience and understanding of ourselves. More accurately, the closer we are to the dimension of primordial presence, the closer our discriminating capacity is to the wisdom of discrimination, and the deeper, more accurate and objective our experience and understanding of ourselves is. Again, this precise and clear discrimination that exists in the depths of the self as an intrinsic facet of its primordial essential nature, makes possible ever deeper, more precise experience and understanding of experience. This deepening in understanding arises through genuine interest in clearer, more precise, and real discrimination of experience. 

Our view of the animal and divine souls is that there is one soul that has both divine/angelic and animal potentials of experience. Her ultimate ground is always the divine or true nature, but she is capable of manifesting various forms of experience on all levels of experience. In other words, the soul has many dimensions of potential, one of these is the animal, and another is the essential; but it also has others, as in the mental and emotional. The soul manifesting an animal form of experience, characterized by desire and aggression, does not indicate that there is another soul. All forms of experience, whether animal desires or essential aspects, are momentary and transitory manifestations; only her ground of true nature wedded to its dynamism is lasting. The soul in her natural condition is open to the totality of her potential: the divine, the animal, and others. (See chapters 5 and 10.) 

As you have experienced in opening to this teaching, strength and aliveness arise within anger; tenderness and gentleness are awakened through sadness, and so on. Being in a field of spiritual inquiry, you can open to new levels of experience with only a small amount of encouragement and guidance. Approaching your experience in a different way than usual—by suspending your ideas and beliefs—opens up new potentials. And through understanding what the emotional charge was about and staying with it, you can see how it deepens your experience and releases the energy that was held inside the emotions. Ideas, history, associations, and beliefs will all arise, but if we stay present and allow ourselves to continue to question and discriminate what is happening in the moment, then the content of what we are hurt by, feeling angry about, or disappointed in becomes clarified. Through understanding, we distill consciousness, in a sense, and are left with a purity, presence, energy. Sometimes we may recognize the loss of our connection to our nature, which can arise as a feeling of emptiness or of something lacking. In allowing this loss and the attendant feelings of grief and longing, we might discover and reconnect to the quality of Being that the emotion was cloaking, along with the liberated energetic dynamism of our aliveness. 

Envision the universe as a living being that, through its differentiations and developments, evolves increasingly sophisticated life-forms which are capable of ever-subtler and more inclusive levels of experience. Each form is a manifestation of this being, and as such, each provides it with different experiences of itself. So each life-form is a way that this living being, the universe, experiences itself. An amoeba is a vehicle for a certain experience of itself, as are a bird and a human. But human beings, as distinct from other life forms, also provide the universe with a way to reflect upon itself. And a complete human being is a way the universe experiences itself completely. To know the truth of Holy Omniscience is to know that you are the eyes of the universe. When you understand this, you know that your job (as the Holy Idea of ennea-type Seven, Holy Work, will tell us) is to make that eye completely transparent and completely open so that you can give the universe an experience of itself in all its dimensionality, in all its variety, in all its colors and flavors. Each spiritual tradition has a different story to explain why we are here. Some say that the unmanifest manifests the universe out of compassion, or out of love, or even out of playfulness. We don’t claim to know the purpose of human life. In fact, we admit the possibility that it may not even be possible to know why we are here. All we really know is that the unmanifest manifests the universe—and we know this from our own experience, which provides the perception of the human being as both an individual and an organ of experience for the whole universe. Experientially, the sense is that the whole universe is behind you, and you are like a window through which it sees. 

Diamond guidance is unexpected in its truth and presence and mysterious in how it functions in guiding our investigation and exploration of the truth of experience. In its full realization it guides and helps at all levels of experience, from the ordinary ego level to the various spiritual levels of experience and realization. It has the uncanny capacity to combine the data of our experience in the here and now with data and knowledge from the past, i.e., learned knowledge. It can take our remembered knowledge, whether from experience or study, and discern what is relevant from it for our present experience, explicating the meaning of the experience in the here and now. Therefore, our understanding and appreciation of the meaning of what is happening now is more complete, for it includes the wisdom of all times. This runs counter to the customary spiritual wisdom that says the mind and intellect are impediments to spiritual experience. In fact, it is not possible to have a complete and precise understanding of our spiritual experience and realization without some realization of this level of intellect—the intellect of light and luminous presence. It discerns, synthesizes, and brings about an experiential comprehension of our experience, whether ordinary or spiritual, thus opening the door to further spiritual discoveries and evolution. It develops the capacity for critical thinking on the spiritual level, so even spiritual realization does not escape this most exacting critical thinking imbued by light and wisdom. It is the true guide on the spiritual journey, which is why in the Diamond Approach we call it diamond guidance. It is a diamond vehicle, so it has all qualities, each as an expression of essential clarity, but all configured in such a way that works to recognize and discern the truth of any experience or manifestation. 

When you fall in love with somebody, you want to know what kind of cereal he eats. You want to know if she prefers chocolate or vanilla. “Are you interested in physics?” “Do you like to exercise?” “What kind of music do you listen to?” “Where were you born?” “What was it like for you growing up?” You want to know everything. You want to explore every bit, inside and out, backward and forward. Love is a force that compels us to want to know more. The heart is the beacon that shows us the way. Through the love for the truth, our direction is set as by an astrolabe. As we melt more completely into our experience, it is the mind that discriminates the truth and meaning of what we are experiencing. A looping between the heart and mind develops that reveals more and more levels of experience, meaning, and truth. The love and knowing create a synergistic effect that enables consciousness to continue beyond what we have known into indescribable universes of experience. As you have all seen in our work together, we are able to speak the unspeakable and name our experience of the unnameable. Our mind and our heart work together, using our words to support the process rather than interfere with it. The beauty of speech in our practice is that we are able to use words as a tool, a vehicle to open to and carry the message and meaning of the invisible into the visible. 

We are referring to the fact that the realization of the Essential Identity makes up only the first step in the resolution of central narcissism, and that central narcissism emerges again at deeper levels of experience. Its resolution at these levels leads to the self-realization of deeper dimensions of Being. The progressive self-realization of deeper and deeper dimensions of Being, indicating the increasing subtlety in its appreciation, finally culminates in the realization of nondual presence, which is the wholeness of the self, experienced in its primordial original condition. This allows us to envision central narcissism as possessing several levels, each associated with the alienation from a certain level of essential identity. We believe these levels of central narcissism are best conceived of as related to stages of development extending from the beginning of life to about sixteen months of age. In this way, we begin with oral narcissism and end with the central narcissism associated with the Essential Identity. We suggest this only as a helpful framework that has emerged from our investigations, but we do not know with certainty whether these levels of central narcissism originate each in a specific and different developmental stage, or are all expressions of one stage. We do observe, however, in the work of self-realization, that these levels emerge in a certain progressive order, and that this progression coincides with increasing manifestations of oral characteristics in the arising associated structures of the self. We also observe that the levels of Being that emerge are inclined towards a deeper and more complete nonduality of experience. 

There are three levels of experiencing faith. The first level results from experiencing Essence as your inner nature; this is the individual level of faith. The second is the boundless level, in which you recognize Essence as the nature of everything. At this level, you have faith in God or reality. The third level is from the perspective of reality, the level of the Holy Ideas. Here, you experience and understand reality directly and objectively, perceiving and understanding its dynamics—what it is and how it works. The faith of this level is the most complete and total, since it arises from experiencing reality in its totality. We can say, then, that the understanding of the various Holy Ideas contributes to the development of faith, but the central and indispensable element in the arising and development of faith is the recognition of Essence as one’s own essence. To talk about faith is to talk about an important development of the path, because it is the expression of a profound transformation in one’s soul. At the beginning of the Work, we can talk about the goal being the realization of the truth, understanding what reality really is. The path is the process by which the soul comes into harmony with that reality, and faith is a by-product of that harmonization. When the soul is in complete harmony with reality, the experience is beyond faith; it is then simply the direct experience of the strength of Essence, which we call Holy Strength.