Love of the truth for its own sake differentiates our work—traveling on the Spacecruiser Inquiry—from many other kinds of things we do in our lives. Inquiry in the Diamond Approach is a concern of the heart, a particular orientation that goes counter to how we generally think and feel and organize our life. Our heart needs to be involved in a pure, selfless way. Selfless means that we don’t want anything for ourselves. We investigate because we are turned on to the truth. We inquire because we can’t help it, because we can’t help liking the truth. We inquire because we really want to find out. What we find out might be wonderful or beautiful, and it might be painful, scary, or difficult. We might even get burned in the process. But none of that matters to the lover. To desire truth for its own sake means that the inquiry is not for your benefit, it’s for the sake of the truth. Yet this is the way that your heart can find its most complete contentment. This is paradoxical because if you are really dedicated to the truth for its own sake without thinking of yourself, if you give yourself over to it, in time the truth will give you back a lot more than you give. The truth is not merely a matter of not lying; it is seeing what the truth is—the essential truth, the absolute truth, which finally reveals the real world. This has been called the Kingdom of Heaven. However, you cannot take the perspective of trying to get to the Kingdom of Heaven. You can’t say, “Well, I’m going to love truth because I know if I get to the truth, then I will feel wonderful.”  

The loss of identity and center may also arise as the absence of orientation. The student feels disoriented; she does not know where she is, or what direction to take. This shows how identity gives the self the sense of orientation and meaningful direction of interest, intention and action. How can she know what to be interested in, what direction to take in her life, what to do, if she is not sure who she is? This absence of center and identity may also manifest as the absence of a meaningful purpose in her life. If she does not know what and who she is, then how can she find a real purpose to her life? This sense of purposelessness is a well-known feature of narcissistic disturbance, but it also arises in the process of self-realization as one recognizes the emptiness of one’s familiar sense of self. From the perspective of self-realization, the life of the self in the dimension of conventional experience lacks a real purpose. 

The loss of essence, the repression of the subtle organs and capacities, the shutting off and distortion of the subtle and energetic centers, and the overall resulting insensitivity, all lead to a general but devastating loss of perspective. The individual no more knows the point of life, of being, of existence. He no longer knows why he is living, what he is supposed to do, where he is going, let alone who he is. He is in fact completely lost. He can only look at his personality, at the environment that created it, and live according to the standards of his particular society, trying all the time to uphold and strengthen his ego identity. He believes he is not lost because he is always attempting to live up to certain standards of success or performance, trying to actualize the dreams of his personality—yet all the time he is missing the point of it all. It is no more the life of being; it is only the life of the personality, and in its very nature it is false and full of suffering. There is tension, contraction, restriction. There is no freedom to be and to enjoy. The true orientation toward the life of essence, the orientation that will bring about the life of the harmonious human being, is absent or distorted. This loss of perspective and orientation leads to the loss of reality. The individual sees only illusions, follows only illusions, for he takes these illusions to be the reality. We are not talking here only about the neurotic or the pathological individual. Such a person, it is true, does not see the reality of the average and adjusted citizen of society. But this means he does not see the reality of the personality; his personality is incomplete, distorted, or too rigid.

Basic trust, on the other hand, is not a trust in some thing, some person, or some situation, and so is not readily diminished by life circumstances. Instead, it gives you an implicit orientation toward all circumstances that allows you to relax and be with them. You feel in your bones that you are and will be okay, even if the events at the moment are disappointing or painful, or even completely disastrous. Consequently, you live your life in such a way that you naturally jump into the abyss without even conceptualizing that you will be okay, since you have the implicit sense that the universe will take care of you. Your life itself becomes a spiritual journey, in which you know that if you stop trying, stop efforting, stop grasping, stop holding on to people, objects, and beliefs, things will be okay, that they will turn out for the best. This doesn’t mean that letting go or allowing structures to dissolve will necessarily feel good—that’s not what you trust. Even if it doesn’t feel good, even if you are frightened, you somehow know that this dissolution will be okay. The capacity to accept the most problematic phase of spiritual transformation—the dissolution of familiar structures and identities—arises from this innate sense of safety and security. 

This is a particular manifestation of the soul, the individual consciousness, that is structured by the patterns of identification originating from the oral stage of development, in the first few months of life. Some of the sources of this manifestation of the soul might be inherent to the soul, due to its physical orientation, and because of its lack of development and refinement. The consciousness arises here as an animal organism, ruled by instinctual desires and dominated by animal cravings. This manifestation of the soul is exposed fully only after a long process of refinement and clarification of consciousness. Once the more superficial ego structures become transparent, previously unconscious, very deep soul structures are revealed, structures associated with the instinctual parts of the soul. This level is patterned only by the most primitive ego structures, originating from experiences in early life. Inquiry into this manifestation reveals it to be the libidinal soul oriented towards external sources of gratification, an orientation that automatically alienates it from the truth of Being. This alienation is always present unconsciously, but at some point can be seen and felt directly as a deficient, hungry emptiness, inherent to the libidinal soul. 

Mental concepts can be more or less aligned with true noetic forms. As you know, the process of becoming objective in our perception of ourselves and the truth of reality is a long and arduous one. It involves an orientation toward truth and objectivity, in which we consistently question the content of the personal mind with its beliefs and reactions, and attempt to see what is actually true and real in our experience. This process involves not assuming that we know the truth, which supports our experience of space and openness. The process continues into the realm of nonconceptual reality, in which the concepts of personal mind no longer determine what we perceive. Here we see the significance of our work on essential aspects: we are working with a knowledge of discriminated reality in realms independent of the personal mind. This work eventually brings us to the realm of the Universal Mind, or what the Greek philosophers called the Nous. At the level of the Nous concepts are more fundamental than ideas in the mind. Awareness of concepts at this level makes it possible for us to communicate and function without relying on the content of personal mind. 

We have seen that inquiry is based on remaining open and without positions. It is guided by the true knowingness of what is happening in our experience, and it is not goal-oriented. Its only interest is the revelation of the truth. You could say that inquiry is the aesthetic appreciation of what our Being reveals. So in some sense, as we learn to do it, we reclaim our free dynamism. In fact, inquiry is an expression of that dynamism. It coincides with the true unfoldment of our Being, which we call understanding. Learning the open attitude of inquiry counteracts our tendency to limit and subvert the free dynamism. With practice, inquiry becomes a mode of inner life that replaces the inner manipulation of ego activity. So instead of trying to do something about a particular state or feeling, for example, we open ourselves to find out and understand it. This changes the whole orientation of our psyche, because ego activity tends to limit true openness. In fact, ego activity blocks the dynamism from its natural freedom and spontaneity because it is based on what we believe is true. In ego activity, we take for granted the knowledge we have accumulated, without questioning it. We take our learning to be conclusive, while inquiry is based on recognizing what is possible and not taking anything as final. That is because its kernel, which is a question, is openness, an openness that wants to find out. We choose to invite Being to freely display its richness. So as inquiry becomes central in our lives, and synergistic with the operation of the Diamond Guidance, the Guidance infuses our everyday life as well as our inquiry. 

When you see how fundamental, how pervasive, how deep and entrenched your physical orientation is, you will notice that you don’t look at even your deep experiences from a total perspective. You look at them from the perspective of the body, from the physical perspective. Most of your issues arise from that perspective. When you feel that you are disappearing, what is it that is disappearing? Usually, it’s the image of your body You are terrified because you believe your physical body is the most important, fundamental, lasting real, fundamental, solid you. If that goes, you go. You don’t think, “I’m just seeing myself from a different place. My perception is detaching from the physical senses, and as a result, I am seeing something deeper than the physical.” If you do see it that way, you won’t feel that you are disappearing. You will be aware that you are not just seeing through your physical senses. Then there will be no fear, and no reason for the terror. So the source of the terror is our belief that the physical body is who we are—fundamentally and ultimately. Our whole society focuses on the physical world as the most fundamental reality. We believe that human beings are discrete objects in physical reality, and therefore, physical death is the end or disappearance of what a person is. However, reality does not exist in discrete objects except in the physical universe. When you penetrate the physical universe and you see what underlies it, you realize that there are no discrete objects. Reality is a oneness, a unity. When we are convinced of the oneness, the unity, we are not afraid of death. 

In the Diamond Approach, our orientation is not toward having spiritual experiences. In fact, we are not interested in having any particular type of experience at all. We are interested in actualizing our potential. This means realizing who we are, discovering what the essence of our Being is, continuing to recognize this, continuing being what we are—our spiritual presence, our true nature—and learning how to live as that. It is a profound, meaningful way of living. So it is not a matter of having a succession of experiences while continuing to be the same person, simply adding on more and more interesting spiritual experiences. No: At some point you learn who you are, what you truly are; and the one who lives your life becomes a different person. There could be other possibilities; you might not even feel like a human being at times, but regardless of the particular form that your being might take at one time or another, you want to be you, as fully and completely as possible. For a long time, you don’t know who that one is. You say, “Me who?” At a certain point, you realize that what you are is not different from recognizing the nature of your awareness, the nature of your consciousness. It is what you are. It is the essence of your Being. And the essence or nature of what we are can express itself in what we call spiritual qualities, or spiritual forms, or different kinds of subtle energies. 

The feeling of being lost or disoriented arises when you lose your sense of identity, your sense of who you are. Every time your assemblage point shifts from its customary place, you are letting go of who you have taken yourself to be. As don Juan says, this brings with it a sense of difficulty and anxiety, and there are many ways that this is experienced. For Point Seven, it is experienced as the sense that, “I am lost. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know which way to go. I don’t know which direction to take and I feel disoriented and unoriented.” Orientation is being in touch with the flow of presence. In disorientation, what is really lost is this sense of presence, of being who you are; but the way this loss is experienced—since it is filtered through the delusion—is that what is lost is knowing what to do and which direction to take. Without the understanding of Holy Wisdom, the delusion arises and you believe it, and this, in conjunction with the loss of holding of Being, leads to this sense of disorientation. 

All this inner activity makes it difficult for us to be ourselves in two fundamental ways. First, our interference blocks the arising of who we truly are. Because we do not embrace whatever is arising, our experience doesn’t have a chance to unfold and manifest True Nature. Our activity prevents it from expressing its natural dynamism, its natural tendency to simply and spontaneously self-reveal, and so we do not perceive or recognize our True Nature. Second, when we think that practice means changing our inner condition instead of letting it change itself, we are taking an orientation toward ourselves that is inherently very different from that of our True Nature. In other words, by siding with this inner activity, we disconnect from our True Nature. Our True Nature is simply there-ness. So, by being internally active, we dissociate, we become something different than what we are, we leave our place of abiding. In some sense, we abandon our self, our nature, to become this active entity that is always trying to change itself. And so we don’t allow our experience to reveal its nature. That’s because we take the view that there is something to accomplish. We think, “Realization is a result dependent on a cause, and that cause is my own effort. If I do such and such, this result will happen.” But that contradicts the reality that realization is what you already are, that you cannot accomplish yourself, you cannot go after yourself. You cannot change what is happening now so that you become yourself. You are already yourself; you just need to relax into it. When that happens, you recognize your True Nature. 

In our Work, we do not seek the harmonious life by putting Band-Aids over our difficulties or patching up the rough spots in our personalities. Regardless of how useful we find the results of therapeutic techniques, we see them as bandages for little rips here and there. That is fine for therapy, but it is not the Work. I think most of you know by now that everything in you is connected with everything else in you and that Band-Aid therapy does not reach deeply enough. We are concerned here with growth, transformation, and development, not with therapeutic intervention or the results of therapeutic techniques. This Work is, however, therapeutic. It has therapeutic results in the sense that change occurs and conflicts are resolved. Yet doing therapy is not our orientation; it is not what we are primarily interested in. What is most important is to facilitate the growth of a human being. To be able to cooperate with transformation rather than oppose it, we need to understand what characterizes any process of growth. What is the most characteristic thing about the process of growth that differentiates it from other processes? 

The state of poverty is the emptiness within the libidinal ego. We experience it as a state of deprivation and insufficiency due to the oral fixation on emptiness as lack of nourishment. This makes us want to move away from it and to seek fullness from outside. This extroverted orientation is one of the first, basic ego attitudes that disconnect the self from its inherent inner richness. Turning toward external objects as sources of fulfillment is the oral fixation of the self on a mode of operation natural and necessary in the first year of life, a fixation that patterns the self in such a way that it alienates it from its inner core. Actual and severe deprivations and disruptions in early infancy will clearly deepen this fixation and give it a distorted character, but this basic fixation develops in all infants because of their total dependency. This patterning is a basic structure of the ego-self. This extroverted orientation coincides with the development of object relations and the object-seeking drive characterizing the libidinal ego. Thus, the self becomes deeply impressed and patterned by the concept of relationship, which means that it is always relating to an object. This pattern becomes an impediment to self-realization, for the self tends to objectify Being and relate to it as an object. The structure of object relations is experienced as relating, and becomes a ground for the development of attachments. These attachments in turn become barriers against the capacity to simply be. This does not mean relating per se is problematic; but to use relating to define identity is.

So understanding doesn’t create or add anything; in fact, it removes what is there to start with. That is why ego tends to experience objective understanding and guidance as some kind of a loss. The ego keeps losing its beliefs, ideas, positions, identifications, and attitudes. But the more we feel this loss that we experience as understanding, the more in touch we are with the essence of our Being, and the more mysterious we recognize it is. In other words, Being reveals its mystery through revealing its truth. By revealing to us more of what it is and how it functions, it shows us how little we know, and that the more we know, the more we realize how little we know. This shows us that the operation of guidance is to take us from a place where we feel we know to a place where we don’t know—a place of mystery. The Guidance takes us from a place where we know how to walk to a place where we don’t know how to walk; from a place where we know how to know to a place where we don’t know how to know; from a place where we can find our orientation to a completely new place in which we feel disoriented. That’s why the Guidance always takes us to the precipice, and why following the Guidance always means jumping off the cliff. It is always taking us to someplace new that we are not familiar with. The unfamiliar place may be an aspect of our unconscious, a forgotten part of our childhood history, or a certain element of our essence or our soul that we have never experienced. Just as a child doesn’t know what growing up will bring the next day, in spiritual development we don’t ever know how or where we are going to be in the next moment. 

When there is no split, no separation between what you take yourself to be and Being itself, then Being becomes lived; it is like the action of a tiger. What motivates a tiger? Where do the actions come from? Is there part of the tiger that wants to do something and another that doesn’t want to do anything or wants to do something different? Is there a kind of meeting together of different motivations and then they do it? Does the tiger have inner conflicts? When the tiger jumps, is it ambivalent? Is part of it holding back? No. If the tiger jumps, everything jumps. It is a complete action—one-pointed, no boundaries, no mind. Just action. Being just acts. Being doesn’t move, it’s still. But it attains a state of true will in the sense that there is a focusing and orientation of Being. It is as if all the atoms in Being were aligned toward one magnetic pole, and it might feel like a growing force. In a magnet, all the atoms are aligned in the same direction, so the magnetic field increases, and that creates a force. The actual Being is like the magnet; in Being the atoms are aligned, and a force and a tremendous focus are created. You can experience Being as a force with a direction from everywhere; it has an energetic sense to it, a feeling of instinct, a feeling that the roots themselves are ready to act. Essentially you become like the tiger. The action is spontaneous, unified, complete, total, clear, specific, with no confusion and no mind. 

So this is where we can see how our orientation, our attitude, about time can become an obstacle, an obscuration, to being our True Nature. If we have the attitude of future orientation, we miss the moment. We are dissociated from the presence of the moment, and we can’t be in the moment. The truth is that our True Nature is similar to the nature of light, which is timeless and which we can experience in the moment as the now-ness of the moment. But if we are oriented toward the future, we are not allowing ourselves to be where we are, which is now, and we are also leaving, dissociating from, the moment. Our nature is light, pure now-ness, so to operate from the perspective of a future that can get better or worse means that we are dissociating ourselves from our True Nature. How am I going to be myself if I do that? How am I going to be where I am? In other words, the orientation of hope—hoping for something in the future—disconnects you from who you really are. The orientation of expectation or of having a goal to accomplish does the same thing. For example, you may be thinking that one of these days, you are going to be enlightened, so you are working at it now. Light would never think that way; it doesn’t posit an end state in which everything is going to be wonderful, and it doesn’t say that we have to practice now in order to get to that goal. For light, that is completely nonsensical; there is just now. Now is just wonderful the way it is, and now is all that we have. 

To know and appreciate the soul is the point of entry into the Diamond Approach, but it is also useful in undergoing any path of inner transformation. In this book we will see how what arises in the path of realization is intricately connected with the qualities of the soul. With this knowledge, we have a clear orientation for inner work, in particular an integration of the many developments and experiences, short-and long-term, that are involved in the path of realization. Knowing the properties of the soul also informs the seeker how to skillfully approach what can and cannot be done in a given situation when confronting certain issues and situations. We are able to understand what methods will work best and how these methods work. We are able to appreciate the rationale behind various methods of inner work; for example, understanding the ground of soul as awareness whose essence can be known to be emptiness helps us to understand how to work with methods which involve space and emptiness. On another level, understanding ego development helps us to understand the particular issues that arise as ego structures are challenged by meditation and other spiritual practices. In addition, even a partial experience and understanding of the soul brings us to an appreciation of the rich, beautiful potential of the soul’s development, realization, and liberation. This direct knowledge of what is possible for our soul is tremendously inspiring and orienting. Recognizing and understanding the soul is itself a large part of the inner development. We spoke in the last chapter of the separation of the soul from the world and from God or Being. Actually, as we will see, only the soul can know and understand Reality in these three facets, so awakening the soul is of the utmost necessity for actualizing our vision. The soul is the window into Reality. The soul is actually much more intimately linked to Reality than we normally perceive, as we will see further on.

As we have seen, if you have a particular goal, a particular orientation toward what you want to happen, then your inquiry is not open ended and most likely you will miss the thread. This means that for your inquiry to be open ended—in order for you to find your own thread and follow it—you need to proceed without any particular goal, without any end state in mind. You must proceed without believing that any particular state of being or realization or enlightenment should happen. You cannot do inquiry and have the attitude, “I’m going to inquire in order to accomplish this state,” even if it happens to be what actually arises when you inquire. The more you inquire from the perspective of a particular end state, the more you make the inquiry into a mental process instead of a real, living one. The moment you have a goal in your mind in terms of how you are going to experience yourself, you are not being personal with yourself. Personal means that right this moment, where you are is where you personally are—it is you now. The moment you say, “I’m going to go someplace” you are no longer personally relating to your immediate reality. You have adopted an abstract, impersonal aim from some source. So looking from the perspective of a certain state or aim is not appropriate to finding your thread. It is forced and unnatural because the particular state or aim that you have in mind is most likely not what is going to happen at this moment. 

The dimension of pure presence is the beginning of the paradoxes of Being, where logical dichotomies no longer hold. Being and nothing are not two things here, for they have not yet been differentiated for the conceptual mind to make them into a dichotomy. Inner essential space appears here as an indistinguishable side of presence, as the nothingness of Being. Its direct feel is somewhat different from the way we have experienced it before, on the preceding dimensions. Space has felt to us similar to physical space, even though pervaded by the clear awareness and psychological spaciousness. It has felt somewhat linear, Euclidean. Now we feel it free from linear Euclidean dimensionality. It feels as if it has no straight lines, no sense of distance, almost no sense of extension at all. We feel like nothing, a nothing that extends forever, without this nothing having any sense of dimension. It is a nothing that underlies and constitutes everything, and hence there are no limitations or boundaries anywhere. Yet, we do not sense any inner structuring that will give us the sense of length, width, and depth. It has no coordinates, at least no Euclidean coordinates. It is like a space that has been destructured, that has lost its spatial structuring. We have no sense of orientation and no sense of its absence, no sense of direction and no sense of its absence. It is like an exploding nothing where we have a sense of exploding only because we still perceive forms arising. 

The work of inner realization requires not only an external supportive context and environment but also the development of an inner vessel, the internal context for the journey. Some Eastern traditions conceptualize this as the inner mandala that constitutes the totality of the personal field of experience; the corresponding notion in the Western tradition is usually seen as the soul. In fact, in our approach, recognizing and understanding the soul as the inner vessel of the work of transformation is the best way to begin the inner investigation. The initial awareness of soul gives us the appropriate orientation, because it begins to show us what we will be exploring. In particular it helps us to recognize what is the “I” that we want to know and understand. When we are aware of the soul, we are aware of what we are actually investigating, the actual medium of experience, rather than merely the contents of experience. As we understand the soul, we appreciate what it is that needs to wake up, to recognize and realize its nature, to develop and become refined. We can know directly what it is that goes through the transformation. In the Diamond Approach, students are taught various practices that develop the capacity to recognize and orient to (and later from) the direct experience of presence, of the field of awareness. In addition, ongoing open inquiry into one’s experience, both of the content of mind/emotion/body and of the field of presence experienced by the student, and the effects of the latter on the former and vice versa, constitute a learning and orientation that support the ongoing revelation of various levels of the truth of the soul’s reality and of Reality beyond the individual soul. The transformations in the sense of self that result from these practices turn out to be systematically consistent with various developments in traditional spiritual teachings.  

In such experiences it is not only that the physical world becomes more vivid; at the same time you become more open to your own presence and awareness, more available to the living, direct perception of what is manifesting in your body, your feelings, and your essential presence. However, even though you might have hundreds of such experiences, it is not easy to actually shift your orientation away from the completely materialistic perspective of the ego. We usually remain utterly convinced of this perspective. To say that you are materialistic does not mean necessarily that you like physical objects, that you think that something like having a car is more important than love. The fundamental attitude is more basic: It is believing that the material is ultimate reality, that it is what’s really important, what’s really there. You believe, for instance, that you are fundamentally your body, and that the body is the most important thing about you, even the most real thing. As we have been seeing in our exploration of nonconceptual reality, you have built up solid, opaque concepts of the world and even of yourself that cause you to experience yourself as a solid, physical, separate entity in a world of solid, separate objects. If you believe that perspective completely, you become complete, pure ego, and you become truly materialistic. So materialism is not only a matter of having materialistic values. Materialism is the conviction that the physical universe is the only universe, and that what we perceive through the senses is all of reality. If you believe only in natural science, you become a materialist.

We know ourselves generally as some kind of consciousness or beingness that has a center. We are some kind of self, some particular orientation, some identity. The identity is separate from other people, separate from the universe, separate from the rest of life. And we think of life as the life of that self, for that self. It is very difficult to imagine how we could live, how we could have a life that is not for that self, a life that is not lived to gratify that self. The orientation tends to remain self-centered even when you are having a wonderful spiritual experience, even when you experience enlightenment. You are in some expanded state, and the ego disappears, and you realize that there is only one thing, one existence. Five minutes later, you are all excited about it. It happened to you. It is very important that it happened to you, not to someone else. Even though you think you lost yourself, you still refer to it as your self. But actually, if you are truly not living for the self, then this experience happening to you is just the same as if it happened to somebody else. It is just as wonderful as if it happened to you. There will not be any difference. I am not saying that after this meeting, you could go home and live from this perspective. Not living from, and for, the self, is the ideal. It is where we want to go. That is the aim. That is living in reality. Today, we are trying to become clear about this aim, this reality, what it is we’re really doing, and the implication of our Work. We need to appreciate the self-sacrifice that is going to be needed. Remember, we are not talking about sacrificing to anyone, to an organization, a teacher, school, or group. It’s a matter of sacrificing to the truth, to what is real.