Almaas: The Guidance comes and goes depending on two things: the objective need of the situation and how open you are to the truth. The more open you are to the truth, the more the Diamond Guidance arises. If you forget about the truth, then the Guidance disappears for a while. Diamond Guidance reveals the truth, so if you are not interested in the truth, why should it stick around? Its mode of operation is not being invited at such times. It is always interested in guiding us, it is always there ready to show itself. But when we don’t invite it, we won’t see that it is there, and we won’t provide the openness it requires for its operation. So we need to turn toward it. The Guidance is guiding us all the time. Much of the time, we don’t want to listen and don’t want to recognize it or listen to it. We are busy with all kinds of other things that we think are more important. That is why the more we attune ourselves, the more we are open, and the more we are interested in the truth, the more we will see guidance everywhere. Guidance appears throughout the whole world. Everything that happens has some kind of guidance in it. We need to remember that the Diamond Guidance is the essential nous, the microcosm of the universal nous. It is nothing but the expression in our souls of the inherent true discriminating knowledge of Being—what I have termed God’s mind. So as we open up to its guidance, it guides us to this universal knowledge, and then guidance is everywhere we look.

This inherent discriminating knowingness of true nature encompasses the content of all that exists, all that can possibly exist, and all that has ever existed. While it transcends the experience of the human soul, it nevertheless appears within our individual consciousness in a specific essential form. More precisely, this knowingness, which is itself the knowledge of everything, manifests in the soul as the specific capacity of discrimination. In other words, the Divine Mind can manifest in the soul in miniature form—a microcosm of that macrocosm. We call this microcosm the Diamond Guidance. The label “Diamond Guidance” reflects the way this essential manifestation of true nature functions, as it reveals the inherent discrimination in experience. When this essential presence manifests in the soul, she can discriminate with the clarity, precision, and penetration of a diamond what is actually present in her field of awareness. The Diamond Guidance can guide the soul all the way from recognizing an emotional truth in the moment to the discernment of the inherent discrimination in reality. That is why I said before that a spaceship that originates from the star system we are traveling to is the most reliable vehicle we can use to go there.

We discuss the personalization of divine love in The Pearl Beyond Price, chapter 36; this process involves some early object relations with one’s parenting objects, especially the loving relation with them and their inadequacies. The rediscovery or recognition of the loving bond leads to a loving connection between the soul and her true nature. Such connection is not an object relation, because there is no object in the Piagetian or psychoanalytic sense. It is more of an experiential recognition of the true and objective relation between the individual soul and true nature. True nature is the ground that manifests all forms, expressing its infinite potential and richness. Such forms include physical forms, such as bodies, inanimate objects, and phenomena like waves and storms. There are also the essential forms, such as aspects and diamond vehicles, among others. Then there are individual souls. Individual souls, especially human souls, embody the full potentiality of true nature. Physical forms do not; they embody only one possible form that true nature can take. Essential aspects express true nature itself in its various perfections. But the soul is like a microcosm of manifest true nature. The soul is a particular local form that has the potential to glow much more intensely than physical forms, and more completely than any essential form. It is a manifestation of true nature, embodying its potential and dynamism, but doing so in time and space, in the world of manifestation. It is a particular wave of the ocean of Being, but a special wave. Its specialness is in its potentiality, reflecting the infinite potential of transcendent true nature itself.

Some people say that if you really let go of your ego boundaries, then you’ll see that you are the universe, and that the stars and galaxies are in you. That is true; however, that is different from the personal. When you are the personal, the universe that you see outside you is completely experienced as inside you, as if you become a miniature universe. When you are truly personal, you are not just merged with the universe, you are a child of the universe. You are the microcosm. Then you can live on this earth with all the pleasures, with all the festivities, and all the freedom and power—all from the universal, but on earth, as a human being. Then you are everything—a friend, a lover, a warrior. You’re the personal and universal with no contradiction. To be oneself is to know oneself from completely original perception. You don’t know yourself by contrasting yourself to somebody else; you know yourself without reference to anything else. We have a longing to be that certain about ourselves. As long as you know yourself as a result of an insight, as a result of comparing yourself to something else, or even fitting your experience with someone else’s ideas or experiences, you have no certainty. The longing for this direct certainty, to be oneself, should be the true motivation for the work. You need to make your search as free and as personal as possible. If it is your search and your seeking, it is not according to what anybody says. You can use what any teacher says; learning about their experiences might open parts of you. But ultimately you need to be quite alone. Then your knowledge comes completely from within you, not from any outside pressure.

We see in this completely personalized state a total synthesis of the universe of the man of spirit and the universe of the man of the world. This is the true, mature human being, who is neither worldly nor otherworldly, neither personal nor impersonal. He is the potential for everything, the expression of all, the miracle of miracles. Here, man is truly the microcosm, reflecting the totality of all of existence, of all its ontological planes, expressed and embodied in one unique human being. No wonder that some of the wise have thought of him as the isthmus, as the vice-regent of the Absolute, and as the expression of the image of God, of the totality of all that there is. We can appreciate now that the human being is a treasure, incomparable and inconceivable. His objectivity has been likened to a precious diamond, and his personhood to a pearl beyond price. When his personhood becomes objective he is then the rare Diamond Pearl.