Today, while having breakfast and then driving to a friend’s house, I am not the absolute, but the person who is a direct expression of it. I experience myself as a person in the absolute, and empowered by it from within. The absolute expands out, infusing the person, and appearing-manifesting through him. I recognize the absolute as the heart of me, the self of me, the nature of me, and the person that I am is an extension of it. The self and the extension are united; the absolute and the soul are married. I experience myself as an extension of the absolute only when there is embodied functioning, such as in eating, walking or driving. In other words, when I am simply resting, not doing anything, I experience myself as the vastness of the mysterious absolute. But when I function, do and act, as an embodied presence, I experience myself as an inseparable extension of the absolute. I function then as an organ of action for absolute Being. In this condition I am mature, completely responsible, totally the center of my life and action. I am total presence. The presence has no veils over it, no defense or pretense. The back is at the front. Nothing, absolutely no part of me, is held back. There is total spontaneity, and absence of self-consciousness. The experience is total presence; complete involvement; utter openness; and non-self-conscious spontaneity. The interplay of involvement and spontaneity, presence and absence, is beautiful and deeply satisfying. I am myself, without a feeling of self. I merely function as my own nature. That is why calling the absolute “ipseity” feels more accurate than thinking of it as ultimate reality or truth. It is the ultimate reality that is both the self and the self-nature.

There are many stories about students who want to serve. Somebody goes to the teacher and says, “Why don’t you give me something to do? I want to serve.” Many times the teacher says, “Go home, take care of your kids. Forget about serving God for now. Just go home, be nice to your wife. When the time comes, you will know how to serve.” There is a need for a tremendous amount of experience, for integration of experience, for balancing factors of all kinds for the soul as an organ of action to function correctly. But we don’t have to be absolutely purified to function with objectivity. If the development is balanced, there is a tendency for action also to be balanced. We can’t be purified all at once, but balance is possible from the beginning. Each one of us will have to allow ourselves to get deeper into our heart and see what our heart really wants. What is the deeper purpose? What is the higher aim? What is the deeper longing for? What does the soul want? What are our priorities in this world, in our lives? Is pleasure our priority? Self-aggrandizement? Fame? Recognition? Or do we seek something deeper, more intrinsic? The soul will not rest until she returns home, back to where she came from. And once the soul arrives home, life is an expression of that origin, a service of that truth. Without returning to our original nature, it’s difficult for us to see what our role in life is, because our minds and hearts are full of concerns and conflicts and problems. Our blessings and realizations are not simply for our enjoyment, but also for our guidance and transformation. And there is no true transformation unless we recognize the limitation of the lollipop stage and have a real motive to go beyond it.

As we explore the knowledge of the soul, we learn that it is an infinite ocean that no one single individual can encompass. The soul, considered the organ of evolution, has infinite realms and facets. Sometimes the soul is called the organ of experience, the organ of perception, or the organ of action. The evolution of the human soul is the evolution of the human being. The soul’s evolution is inextricably linked with the experiential knowledge of Essence, which is inextricably linked with the experiential knowledge of the cosmic realms, what I refer to sometimes as the ground dimensions. The knowledge of the soul does not mean only experience of the various states and conditions and transformations of the soul, which is the personal consciousness. It also includes the various capacities and functions. To know the capacities and functions of the soul means to know how to operate as human beings should or can operate. The knowledge of the soul includes knowing how to live correctly. The soul evolves through some kind of education. Frequently, while some parts of the soul develop, others remain untouched. Often the development of the soul is not balanced, is askew in various ways. So we tend to go around in circles instead of going straight because of this imbalance in development. But with the development of balance, we learn to move forward, toward greater evolution and expansion.

The dynamic of realization—the dance of practice and awakening—is a dialectic that combines the dual and the nondual views in an inextricable and indescribable way. We inquire as an individual who is exerting, who is endeavoring and is fully engaged, fully interested, fully committed, and fully devoted. And yet, being fully engaged and devoted means that it is true nature expressing itself in those ways, and its purity is expressed as the practice of an individual consciousness. This is how grace is inseparable from practice, from our own activity—or, at least, what we consider to be our own individual actions, orientations, and attitudes. How else is true nature going to express itself as Total Being? How is it going to reveal itself, illuminate itself, liberate itself, and wake itself up, except through the individual? The individual is both its organ of perception and its organ of action, the lens through which it perceives and the instrument through which it operates. The dialectic between individual practice and realization—the fulcrum of the path—reveals the mystery of two that are one and one that expresses itself as two. Practice and realization are not separate, yet they are distinct. Neither practice nor realization subsumes or displaces the other, and yet they are inextricably one. They are distinct and yet one; we cannot rightly consider them two separate things nor the same thing. It’s true that we can see their relationship as dual—as two things that are related in various ways—or we can see their relationship as nondual, as the same indivisible unity. But the fourth turning reveals that the relationship of practice and realization is far more mysterious than either of these possibilities suggests.