The issues of basic trust and the surrender that it engenders are not specific to the work on narcissism. However, some resolution of these issues is necessary for the surrender involved in slowing down and ceasing ego activity. The realization of this quality of love which we call Living Daylight or Loving Light resolves these issues. The Presence of the Living Daylight helps us let go of the empty shell, to allow the narcissistic wound and accept the narcissistic emptiness. This boundless, loving Presence makes it easier for the self to relax and cease activity. 

The more we are identified with the false self, the personality, the more we are identified with the absence of basic trust. In order to develop basic trust, and consequently more contact and identification with Being, we need to experience the lack of holding imprinted on our souls. As with any other aspect or dimension of Being, we must first work through the resistance to experiencing the absence or “hole” of it, and then when we fully experience this hole, the missing quality will arise. The effect of the hole of Living Daylight in early childhood is experienced in adulthood in many ways. Emotionally, it will be felt as the need for holding and the sense that no one and nothing is holding you. The feeling of the need itself might be defended against by a lack of trust that anyone will be there for you. This need for holding might be experienced as the desire to be taken care of, the need to be actually physically held, the need for someone to see you and support you. This can lead to the physical sense that there is a kind of emptiness in the belly which makes you feel as if you are suspended in a cold and inhospitable space. This emptiness carries with it the sense that you want to be held, but nobody and nothing is holding you. As we have seen, the central element of the holding in infancy was physical holding and care, but the sense of holding is also global, including the sense of being held emotionally and mentally. Ultimately, it is the sense that your soul is being held. 

The actual experience of Living Daylight can help us understand this ground and the issues associated with it. When you become aware of the quality of Living Daylight that gives rise to the sense of basic trust, the feeling is that everything is okay in a deep, intrinsic way—not that there aren’t difficulties or pain, but that things are workable. You have the sense of being taken care of and of being held, as we have said, and if this experience deepens, you will feel that you are enveloped and comforted by a soft, loving, gentle presence. It feels as though the environment around you is soft, supportive, protective, and understanding. You might experience it literally as the sense of being held by a wonderful light love. You might also have the sense that all parts of you are held together so that they can grow and develop to become all that they can.

As we discussed in Part One, the quality of Living Daylight functions like a solvent, melting all boundaries. For this reason, in our work, it is the specific energy required for working on the Holy Ideas. The aspect of space erases boundaries, while Living Daylight dissolves them into itself. In the presence of Living Daylight, boundaries lose their opacity, their rigidity, their partitioning quality, and they become merely outlines. The sense of separateness is dissolved through love, and everyone and everything is seen as love, a manifestation of an ocean of love. When we have this experience, we understand what Holy Omniscience means. Then we also can understand objectively what it is to be a human being: It is to be an extension of the objective truth. We recognize that, as human beings, we are organs of perception for the universe, and that this Holy Idea explicates the place of the human in relation to the living universe. Through us, the universe experiences or knows itself fully, not only physically, not only emotionally, not only mentally, but on all the spiritual dimensions as well. 

Living Daylight is the most accessible of what we call the boundless cosmic dimensions. We call them dimensions in that although they are each experienced as one medium, each contains within it all the qualities of our True Nature, the essential aspects. Living Daylight is the first of these boundless or universal dimensions, meaning that it is the beginning of seeing that the whole universe is animate and conscious -- pervaded by an intelligent consciousness. It is sometimes experienced as a sense of blessing, which in Sufism is called baraka. Because Living Daylight is a boundless dimension and at the same time the source of basic trust, it functions as the appropriate holding for the soul in the transition from individual experience to the boundless unity of Being.

So the experience of boundlessness that arises as we move into the formless dimensions becomes the deepest level of truth that we perceive. On the level of the Supreme (the dimension of Pure Presence or Pure Being), for example, you realize that everything is a translucent Beingness. You see that it is not as though translucent Beingness is in everything or that everything exists in it, but that everything is the translucence. It is inside things, outside things, and in between them. There is no place that is not translucent Beingness. On this level of the Supreme, there is no separation between what we call appearance and reality, the form and the meaning. They are all one thing; there is a unity. The perception of this unity arises through merely seeking to understand the truth of the situation. It is not a matter of generating a particular experience; you just open your eyes to what is here. When you experience this level of truth, you not only perceive this inherent unity, but you also see that as you stay with one boundless dimension, it reveals another, deeper one. Dimensions of formless Being reveal themselves until we come to the origin and source of all dimensions, the Absolute. Initially, you might experience the Absolute as the source of everything, but as your experience matures, you realize that everything is the Absolute—there is no separation. The full experience of the Absolute is that there is nothing but the Absolute. Just as you have seen that love constitutes everything on the dimension of Living Daylight, and Being constitutes everything on the level of the Supreme, here we see that the Absolute constitutes everything. So as our understanding of the nature of reality deepens, it becomes more and more mysterious and nonconceptual, until it arrives at this dimension of the Absolute in which the nature of reality reveals itself as a profound mystery. 

Allowing ourselves to experience the hole of holding is a crucial step in reclaiming contact with the holding dimension of Being, Living Daylight. Your sense of basic trust is also increased each time you experience the environment responding to you in a supportive way and each time you experience yourself being held in one way or another. In the process of spiritual work, each time you move beyond your usual sense of reality and of who you are—each time you jump into the abyss with its sense of disintegration or fragmentation and accompanying fear—and you experience Being coming through, giving you a sense of support, a sense of relief, of satisfaction, of meaning, your basic trust is strengthened. The more experiences you have that involve dealing with painful states and memories, and resolving them, allowing you to connect with various aspects of your fundamental nature, the more that sense of trust is created. The more your soul is held and the more basic trust is developed, the more you will unfold. Providing this holding for who you really are is one of the functions of a spiritual teaching and a teacher. So the whole of the Work ultimately builds basic trust.

From the direct experience of Living Daylight, we can see that the situation in childhood that contributes to the sense of basic trust is what is referred to in the psychological literature as the “holding environment.” The person most responsible for this concept of holding is D.W. Winnicott, an important figure in the British object relations school. What he calls the holding environment is the environment during the first year or so of life, the period of infancy before the child begins to develop a separate sense of self. Initially, the environment is the womb; later on it is the arms that held you, mother’s lap, perhaps father and other people, the environment of your crib, your bedroom, your house—the whole situation. So “holding environment” here means the totality of the surroundings and the general feel of it through the formative years. Mother is central to this environment but it isn’t limited to her. The child can experience the environment as more or less holding. If the environment is a good holding environment, it makes you feel taken care of, protected, understood, loved, and held in such a way that your consciousness—which at the beginning is unformed, fluid, and changeable—can grow spontaneously and naturally on its own. The soul in this respect is like a seedling. A seedling needs a particular holding environment in order to develop into a tree: the right soil, enough water, the right nutrients, the right amounts of light and shade. If it doesn’t have the proper holding environment, it won’t grow steadily and healthily, and it might not grow at all.

When a baby is held in a way that is holding, it feels held in a way similar to how it was held inside the womb, and there is less discontinuity in the holding from its life inside mother’s body to outside of it. This sense of holding will not disrupt the child’s sense of basic trust, and the effect will be that Living Daylight—the loving and supportive dimension of Being—remains an intrinsic part of its sense of reality. The holding becomes integrated into the depths of its consciousness, and the result is a sense of basic trust in reality. The child’s sense of basic trust will begin in relationship to mother and the holding environment, and will extend to the world and the whole universe. This will allow the child to grow and develop into its full potential. A good holding environment is not just a matter of the mother loving and providing physically for her child; the emotional climate in the family is a part of the holding of the environment as well. If there is tension between the parents, for example, the child will feel it and the sense of holding will be somewhat disrupted. The presence or absence of other siblings and their interrelationships also affects the holding of the environment, as do the environment’s actual physical qualities. Whether it is chaotic or dreary, too noisy or lacking in stimulation for the child, all affect the amount of holding he or she experiences.

The issues of basic trust and the surrender that it engenders are not specific to the work on narcissism. However, some resolution of these issues is necessary for the surrender involved in slowing down and ceasing ego activity. The realization of this quality of love which we call Living Daylight or Loving Light resolves these issues. The Presence of the Living Daylight helps us let go of the empty shell, to allow the narcissistic wound and accept the narcissistic emptiness. This boundless, loving Presence makes it easier for the self to relax and cease activity.

Living Daylight, this tender and loving presence, is experienced as the origin of all states of consciousness, as well as the origin of everything. If this loving presence is seen as the true nature of everything that exists, the universe is seen as benevolent since it is made up of benevolence, and is therefore something you can trust. The soul feels held by the universe, taken care of in a loving, appropriate way, provided for, supported and loved. This universal conscious presence is experienced not only as loving but also soft, sweet, gentle, and delicate, giving you the sense that you are held in a loving embrace by the universe. If the universe as a whole and everything in it is pervaded by, is composed of, and is an expression of, this fundamental loving presence, it is natural that you would feel relaxed and trusting, with the sense that you will be taken care of and that things are going to turn out okay.

Generally, most people initially experience unity while experiencing one of the formless dimensions by itself. So if one is experiencing the state of unity on the level of Living Daylight alone, it would be the sense that everything is love; or if one is experiencing it on the level of the Supreme by itself, it would be the sense that everything is pure Being, pure presence. Again, this is not the experience that everything is made out of love or of Being, which is the experience of these dimensions still infused with duality; but that the whole universe is Living Daylight or is the Supreme. This is the state of unification.

What determines whether a soul has basic trust? Basic trust is the effect on the soul of a particular aspect or quality of Being that we call Living Daylight. We call it this because if one's perception is subtle enough to visually see and kinesthetically feel the substance of one's consciousness, it actually looks like daylight, and is felt as an alive consciousness. It is experienced as something boundless, in the sense that it is not bounded by one's body but rather is experienced as something that everything is made of. It is a universal sense of presence in that it pervades everything and is everywhere. The first level of experiencing it is to perceive that it is everywhere; the second level is to see that everything comes out of it; and the deepest level is to know that everything is made of it. At this deepest level, everything in the universe is seen to be originating in, bathed in, and constituted by Living Daylight.

The more you get in touch with the helplessness, the more you might also get in touch with a specific physical blockage against it, which is the same thing as holding on to the delusion of vanity, of separate doership. This blockage is a specific holding at the anterior fontanel (at the front of the head) which blocks the channel of Living Daylight. When we see through this delusion and surrender our striving and our belief in it, this channel opens up. Then we can experience the beginning of real holding, the beginning of blessing as a descent of light that is love. This loving light expresses the action of Being as it melts the rigidities and fixations of the soul. When this occurs, we see that vanity is the specific blockage against the channel of Living Daylight, because in believing in yourself as a separate doer, you are taking God’s place. In other words, vanity and striving are reflections of the position that one does not need real holding. You feel that you can do it on your own and so you don’t need nourishment—whether human or divine. It also means that you believe that you do not need grace, and therefore block it. Grace is the descent of Living Daylight, specifically in regard to dissolving boundaries, so it allows us to be held by the universe and to trust in it. When you connect with this level of reality, the degree of holding in the environment ceases to be an issue. The environment that allows us to dissolve is Being itself, and when we connect with that dimension of reality, we feel held no matter what situation we are in.