A parent who is loving, caring, and supportive of the child helps the personality to grow more balanced and healthy and is less opposed to the beingness of the child. But this is still a far cry from actually seeing the essence, understanding it, and encouraging it to grow according to its own truth. Regardless of how loving the parents are toward their children, if the personality is the center of their life, the same will happen to the children. They will end up with the personality as the center, essence being buried. So the problem is not a lack of good intentions and good will. It is a lack of something much more fundamental than that; it is the lack of the right orientation, the right perspective, and the right understanding. We saw in Chapter Two that most people do not recognize their essence. They also fail to recognize it in others, including their children. They wouldn't be able to even if they wanted to. In fact, they must ignore it, or they will have to confront their personality, with its losses and lacks. We are not saying here that the personality has to be inimical and opposed to essence. We are pointing to the fact that it is usually so and that it is so primarily because it believes itself to be the true self and center of the human being. This usurpation of the position of essence (the servants becoming the masters of the house) creates a perspective and orientation contrary to that of essence. 

You set goals to accomplish certain things or to be a certain way because you believe that the way things are and the way you are at the present time are not good enough, and won’t get you what you want. You also think that having no goals would mean that you would be bored or lazy or half-dead, or that there’s something wrong with you. Having goals in this way is one way to live your life. A second way is to live in the present, to be who you are at the moment, as a completeness and a fullness. This means actualizing who you are. At any moment you are who you are, and there is no need to be anything or to go anywhere. It is because you are not who you are that you want to be something, and you create all these goals and aims. Because who you are is missing, you have no true direction; your life feels meaningless, insignificant, with no value and no orientation. You attempt to fill this deficiency with goals and ideals and aims in order to create a sense of significance, meaning, fullness, importance, orientation, direction. However, when you let yourself be who you are instead of trying to be something different, you experience everything in your life as significant and important without even thinking of things as significant and important, by virtue of just being, just living. This kind of living does not exclude goals. A person living in the present can have goals, but the goals are not to be something; the goals are an expression and the result of who the person is at the moment. The person is already fulfilled, and that fulfillment can then manifest as certain goals. 

The orientation toward living the truth that we know connects us with another Diamond Dimension, called the Citadel. Like the Diamond Guidance, this manifestation of Being possesses specialized functions that can be used in personal development and life in general. As an integrated expression of our true nature, the Citadel functions as a unit—a Diamond Vehicle—where all the aspects of Essence appear as a structure that functions in a unified manner. While the Diamond Guidance guides the soul’s inner unfoldment toward true nature, the Citadel is a vehicle of understanding and guidance for living a life in the world that is aligned with the truth. Its presence provides a specific support for how to live our life, how to relate to our situation, and how to conduct our affairs according to the wisdom of our true nature. This ultimately means creating or arranging our environment to help us live the way we know truth to be. As the Citadel is realized, it provides the soul with all the essential aspects as specific supports for living a life of truth. We call it the Citadel because it can manifest as an enormous, solid presence—like a mighty fortress—that supports and protects the truth as it manifests in our life. The various defensive ego functions that have helped us operate without the ground of our true nature are replaced by this immense and powerful support of Being itself. The more we learn to bring our awareness of truth into the functioning of our life, the more we gain access to the essential grounding, guidance, and protection of the Citadel. 

The alienation from the Essential Identity results in narcissistic emptiness. This feels like a deficient emptiness, the specific deficiency being the feeling of absence of the sense of self. It is the loss of identity. Instead of clear and definite self-recognition, the person feels an emptiness, a phenomenological nothingness, with an accompanying sense of no identity. She feels that her self is missing. This deficient emptiness makes her feel lost, with no center, no orientation, no purpose, no meaning.     A typical reaction to this deficient emptiness comes in the form of superego attacks. One feels one is worthless, not important, not good enough, or perhaps fake. The deficient emptiness is the feeling of having no self, which can feel like a lack of center or orientation. When this emptiness is arising, superego reactions—self-attacks, such as feeling one is worthless, not important, or not good enough—might arise as resistances to directly experiencing the deficiency. These reactions are partly due to disconnection from the value of Being. A healthy reaction at this point might be the sense of remorse of conscience, for failing to be authentic. 

As we continue to examine practice from the perspective of realization, as we see how practice is realization, we can recognize another position, another attitude that we tend to have in relation to practice. As we challenge one assumption, we encounter further ones. We explored how practice needs to become continual in order for it to be an effective practice. But effective toward what end? We realize at some point that practicing doesn’t mean that we are practicing for a reason. For most people, before realization matures, practice seems to be both pushed and pulled: pushed by motivation and pulled by a goal. So we are motivated because we usually have a goal in mind. Motivation and goal orientation are two ends of the same delusion, the same misinterpretation of reality. Or we could say that they are two facets of the same approximate, but ultimately limited, view of reality. Most of us are practicing for a reason; we are practicing so that something will happen. Isn’t that why you are practicing? Otherwise, why would anybody practice? You would be out of your mind if you were practicing for no reason. And that is true; you will be out of your mind—at least out of your ordinary mind. So, from the perspective of the individual soul, one of the holy cows of practice is that we practice in order to become realized, awakened, enlightened, and free. When we say that practice is realization, we mean precisely that: Practice is not for realization, it is realization. 

So noetic forms are independent of our personal orientation, independent of our history of learning to name and discriminate things. As we have discussed, the process of conceptualizing the elements of our experience and reifying the concepts in our minds creates a world made up of opaque and separate entities. This reification constitutes a powerful barrier to our capacity to experience reality with no concepts, to experience the dimension of the nonconceptual. It also prevents us from seeing the level of oneness. Two elements of perception must shift to make a transition from living in the world of mental objects to perceiving the world of actual noetic forms: First, the perception of forms as separated, discrete objects must shift, so that there is a perception of oneness where there are discriminated perceptions but without separating boundaries. In this level of perception, forms and concepts are seen as transparent. Second, the capacity to be conscious and aware of reality without any conceptualization at all is needed. This is perception in the nonconceptual realm—what some call the “ground of awareness.” These capacities do not necessarily develop in a particular order; they each have many issues and barriers associated with them, which we have begun to address in the past few meetings. 

This particular book emphasizes aspects of the view and method of Almaas’s work which move toward deconstruction of ego structures, freeing of the soul from false identities, and spontaneity of experience. At the same time, this work is oriented toward truth and logic. The power and precision of this work arises from a keen appreciation of the importance of understanding the objective structures in which Being manifests. In fact Almaas’s orientation is not at all predisposed toward freeing the self from structure per se, or breaking down structure. His orientation, with its working method of openly inquiring into one’s present experience without holding on to prior positions (all the while noting the inevitable tendencies toward position-taking), investigates the phenomenon of what is actually present as the experienced self, with a view to understanding what is determining the experience of that self. It is true that this method of illuminating the structures which determine the experience of the self is inherently liberating. However, the identity of the soul, when it is freed from false (mentally determined) structures, does not simply remain in a homogenous state of presence or emptiness. Rather, like all the manifest world, it continues dynamically to unfold, manifesting as various forms arising and passing away. This unfolding has an inherent logic and intelligence, related to what Greek (and later, Christian) traditions call the Logos. Thus, as self-realization becomes more established, the experience of the soul is less and less structured by images in the mind, and more and more structured by the inherent logic of the dynamic unfoldment of Being. 

Ultimately, we are Being. The process of the Work includes the goal, because from the beginning, in the process of understanding yourself, the perspective is toward Being, not toward doing some activity. If you are reacting in the work on yourself, you are perpetuating the personality. But if you understand from the beginning that this reaction and activity of the personality is itself a non-Being, is a resistance against Being, then perhaps your orientation will be more influenced by Being. So the goal is in you from the beginning. Now, Being is very mysterious. To truly understand the action of the personality, to understand that it is a cyclic movement of reactivity, you must know Being. It is the contrast with Being that reveals the core reactivity. That’s why I have said that you need to go to the sharp edge between reactivity and Being, and when they are next to each other in your experience, you can say, “Yes, this is reaction.” Before you know Being, before you are Being, you are too identified with the personality to get a perspective on it. When you are Being, you are aware of its stillness and objectivity and can see in contrast the feverish activity of the contracted personality. You see that there’s nothing intrinsically there. There’s a contraction, there is movement, pushing and pulling, and there is frustration. 

The orientation of inquiry is to inquire into your experience as it happens. As we do that, we notice an optimizing force that leads us to our true self. However, we also notice that the true self doesn’t say, “I want you to go toward your true self.” The true self does not operate with that intention. So we do not work with that intention; instead we want to harmonize ourselves with the true self, which is goalless, endless. This is very tricky. You can always say, “The true self is pure awareness, so let’s develop awareness.” Or you can say, “The true self is lovingness; let’s develop love.” The true self means no blockages, so you can say, “Let’s work on blockages.” Many teachings do exactly that, but the true self does not say any of these things. The true self never tries to make anything happen. It does not have a particular position. It embodies an attitude of complete allowing and freedom: Whatever arises is fine. The true self will just guide you toward understanding your experience, appreciating it, and moving on. Finding your true self is a good thing, but there are many ways of going about it. In the Diamond Approach, we don’t look for it; it happens as a natural consequence of our inquiry. If you trust the process of following your thread, the optimizing dynamism will manifest whatever is supposed to happen. 

Comparative judgment disconnects you from Being whether the comparisons you make are accurate or not. This happens when you take a position about what’s supposed to happen and then try to practice from within that context. For example, you may realize that the way you are right now is not the fullness of humanity; it is not the most realized, most whole, deepest possible condition. You may be aware that feeling compassionate toward someone would be more effective than the resentment you are feeling. And sometimes you can’t help but know that there are conditions that feel better than what you are feeling at that moment. But if you use that understanding to judge where you are, to reject where you are and try to manipulate yourself to fit better into your ideal of where you think you should be, you are engaging in the normal ego activity of rejection. This will merely inhibit your development. No matter where our particular focus is, the orientation of the Work is always to align ourselves more and more with the nature of Being itself. 

The method of inner work developed by Almaas is not connected with a religious or mystical tradition, although it draws on the wisdom of several traditions as well as on psychology and various scientific orientations. Because the main method of this work is open and open-ended inquiry, the orientation of the work itself has a scientific sense to it: the extensive practice of suspension of identification with the content of thoughts, for example, is done not primarily with a certain end state in mind, but more in an experimental mode, as part of an inquiry into one’s experience. Here it resembles Husserl’s phenomenology, which attempted a scientific (in the sense of suspending one’s assumptions and beliefs as much as possible) inquiry into consciousness. The practices and inquiry are done always with reference to understanding and its effect on the soul, and always with reference to one’s actual lived experience in the moment. The application of psychological understanding helps to make conscious and thus render transparent various mental structures, removing the veils of identification with those structures, not by an effort to move one’s awareness somewhere else, but simply by understanding the patterns and the status of those patterns relative to other modes of experience. As openness of mind develops, the process of understanding and disidentification with the soul’s ego structures becomes increasingly fluid, even as the uncovering of increasingly primitive or archaic structures presents a challenge to the soul’s ability to persevere in her open inquiry. This perseverance is supported by an increasingly clear love of the truth of reality itself; one’s intimate experience of what in Sufism is called “nearness to God” brings growing courage and devotion to the soul’s process. 

Using the understanding of Holy Will, our method in the Diamond Approach is to welcome whatever happens and whatever it is that you are experiencing. You stay present with it and you become curious about it, wanting to understand it in an experiential way, out of love for truth. The orientation is not toward a certain state, because the moment that you orient your practice toward a certain state, you have left Holy Freedom. Even if the state that you are trying to cultivate is Holy Freedom or Holy Truth, if that is not what is unfolding in your experience, you are imposing your egoic will onto your process to direct it toward the Holy Idea. Our orientation, then, is toward freedom: complete and total independence from any state or dimension. We see that any state is fine if it is completely surrendered to. What the state depends on is Holy Will, and not on your desires. That is always the case, since that is the objective fact of Holy Will. So the more that you approach your process in this way, the more you will naturally move into the boundless dimensions and, ultimately, into Holy Truth. This will happen on its own because it is the nature of reality to progressively reveal itself, taking you closer and closer to its ultimate nature, so there is no need to direct your process toward it. If you try to push your process in any direction, you are really just standing in your own way. So to practice using the Diamond Approach means to be present with what is happening without judging it as good or bad, without holding onto it or pushing it away. You stay with it, open and curious about what it is, loving the truth of it as it reveals itself. This is really an expression of love for Holy Truth as it unfolds in its various manifestations. This is real freedom, and is the basis of nonconceptual freedom in the Diamond Approach. 

So we see that we can’t approach the work on ourselves—the work of going toward truth—from a mental perspective. We can’t approach it from a strictly practical perspective. We can’t approach it from a needy perspective. It will have to come from an appreciative place, from a giving place, from a selfless place. When we inquire and explore from that place, we act from one central motive. It is difficult to even call it a motive, because we usually think of motives as being oriented toward particular ends. The motive of loving truth for its own sake doesn’t have an end in mind. The point is just to know the truth, whatever it is. What will result from that is not a concern. This orientation toward truth is different from how our society appreciates truth as a virtue. It is generally agreed that it is a good thing to be truthful, to acknowledge the truth, to confront the truth, and so on. However, we usually tend not to focus on the truth until things get tough. When things are going fine in your life, people don’t tell you, “Well, you’d better see the truth about your situation.” They tend to believe that the truth is needed just to help resolve problems or when things aren’t going well. So the general cultural or societal attitude about appreciating the truth is not the attitude we’re looking for. When you inquire and are exploring your experience, you need to be inspired by a sincere interest in finding the truth. You’re seeking the truth not because an experience is difficult or painful, but because there is something in the experience you don’t get, something you don’t understand. It’s not that you have a problem and you want to solve it. It’s not because you’re confused and you don’t like feeling confused. It’s not that you’re trying to get to a certain state of clarity. It’s more like you really want to recognize what’s going on. 

Our orientation here is always toward truth. It is about allowing, understanding and accepting what is there. This doesn’t mean that you need to feel resignation. It means accepting and being open to what is there and what happens. That is not resignation. You are completely allowing your experience without saying no to it, without saying yes to it. If you are really open in this way, things will change on their own. Nothing will stay the same. I am not interested in changing people. I am not here to change you or to make you feel better or happier. This does not mean I am against change, nor that there be no change. We do not focus on the change itself, because you can focus on change only from your old perspective. The best way to go about this work is to explore the truth. If there is going to be change, the change will come from the truth itself. I cannot determine it; you cannot determine it. The truth itself, reality, will determine it. I don’t try to change anyone; I don’t know how you should be. Who am I to say you should be this way, or that way, with this kind of job, or that kind of life? I can only look at the situation and help you understand it, and from that something will unfold. The only thing you can do is to be as aware as possible. Be conscious of yourself, your situation, your reactions. Consciousness, awareness and attention, make it possible to understand what is happening. It is also possible to see the truth, to see how you are interfering and to understand how your interference is producing your conflict and suffering. When you see this completely, you will stop interfering. When you do stop, the truth will emerge. What is real in you, your essence, will help you only when you cease to interfere. What is real and true in us, what is alive, what is loving, what is genuine, will emerge and assist us only when we take the attitude of being aware and paying attention without trying to change anything. 

If you follow the truth, you will get to deeper and more objective truth. And if you keep following the truth, you will get to the deepest and the Ultimate Truth, the Absolute. That is why we always emphasize the truth. If you seek anything else, you might not get to the Absolute. If you seek anything that is not truth, you will get the thing you seek. But if you seek truth and you really want the truth, the truth will be revealed to you. So our perspective here is that we work on all kinds of things. We work on personal things, practical things, day-to-day things. Ultimately we work on these things not for their own sake, but to follow the truth to ultimate reality. What will ultimately satisfy you is the truth. You might not believe me in the beginning, but that doesn’t matter. You will find out on your own if you truly follow the track of truth. When I say that our orientation is to follow truth all the way to the Ultimate Truth, I mean that the inner journey transcends life and death. When we talk about the ultimate or absolute truth, we don’t mean some kind of mysterious thing someplace. In the beginning it might appear that the truth is some kind of distant, mysterious, unknowable thing, maybe at the depth of your heart or at the center of the universe. But the truth is everywhere and is everything. When you realize the absolute truth, you realize everything is the truth. You cannot see that until you realize the Absolute, its reality and its purity. Then you realize there is nothing else. You forget about spiritual experience. You are not spiritual anymore. You become this-worldly instead of otherworldly. You realize that the world is the Absolute. Everything you see is the spirit, the Absolute. There is nothing else.

However, when we see without veils, we experience that the whole of existence possesses a single true nature—its common essential ground—and we find no distinction between appearance and true nature, for nothing can be separate from its nature. This is objective reality—all of existence perceived in its true, unobscured condition, in which everything is inseparable from its true nature. Experiencing this is enlightened or realized experience. We understand then that everything is really true nature, that the whole world is nothing but true nature displaying its inherent potentialities. We still see the many forms that reality takes, but those forms are transparent to their true nature, the essential ground of all of reality. On the journey of self-realization, it is important to learn to differentiate true nature from the familiar forms of everyday experience. Our very inability to do this accounts for much of the control that conventional reality has over our awareness. Unless we discriminate this formless ground, we will never be able to perceive the forms of reality in their true fullness. Therefore, true nature must first be discriminated in order to serve as our orientation for the inner journey. In the realized state, this discrimination is transcended and true nature is finally recognized in its truth—as inseparable from reality. 

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. The balanced approach to experience is exactly what is needed to actually do the work. The more we have that balanced attitude, the easier the work is, and the more naturally and spontaneously it happens. We need to remember and be aware that it’s not simply the experience that matters, but how we relate to it. If we approach our experience with an attitude of greed, the experience will likely be used to feed an endless emptiness that can never be filled. But if we approach our experience with a balanced attitude, the experience could expose that bottomless chasm without trying to fill it. So our orientation toward experience needs to be one of learning. No matter how painful, pure, or wonderful, all experiences are good when approached with a correct attitude. Approaching an experience with the attitude of learning is an ultimate attunement to reality. Learning this attunement to reality is a challenging process that requires us to approach our difficulties with humility and detachment. The work we do here is not religious in the traditional sense. Although religion recognizes, in some sense, the balanced attitude toward experience, our work is more basic. Ultimately, we work from an understanding that is the source of religions, sciences, and philosophies, that is the ground of objective knowledge. 

How do you experience now? How do you get a taste, a flavor, of now? This flavor, this texture of the now, is the immediacy of the experience of awareness, consciousness, presence. It is like trying to find out what fluid light is made of. It is made out of now, out of now-ness. It is an unchanging, condensed now, a full, indestructible now. It is a now that is at all times, for it is the now that is the present of all times—past, present, and future. And it doesn’t change from an instant in the past to an instant in the future. It is the same now—always fresh. Time doesn’t have an impact on the now. What is useful to recognize, then, is that our time orientation will disconnect us from our True Nature because it contradicts the now-ness, the timelessness, of our True Nature. It is paradoxical, of course, to think about things that way because we are always thinking in terms of time. The time axis is very important for the mind. The mind is always thinking of things in the past and of what it is going to do in the future. It rarely settles in the moment. If it did, it would become quiet. When you settle into the moment, you realize that there is not much happening—a few things here and there. The primary awareness is of the immediacy of the moment. This is because presence—being in the now—is characterized by beingness, simply being here now. In contrast, our familiar self is based on doing, going, making things happen. We do not trust that action can arise and proceed from inner stillness; we do not recognize that Being is the ground of everything. To be in the now connects you with that quiet beingness that underlies all changes, all activity—the simple hereness where what is most basic is not activity but presence. 

As a result, whenever the soul experiences any need, any inner emptiness, the original template that the soul will morph her experience through will be that of an empty stomach wanting something from outside her. This outer- directed orientation characterizes the animal soul, and functions as the fundamental underlying attitude of the ego-self. The soul is then not only externally oriented, but she is always ready to move forcefully outward. This compulsive and rigidly structured outwardness, in both orientation and action, automatically dissociates the soul from her essence. Essence is the inner, the depth; fixated orientation away from it is bound to dissociate us from it. The compulsive outward movement literally means the soul leaves her essential ground for the object of her gratification. The end result is not only dissociation, but the fixated position that richness resides outside, when in reality, for the adult soul it is primarily inside. Because of this fixed animal structure, the soul will find it difficult to commit to her inner richness, even when she experiences and understands its unlimitedness, for this fixation is so deeply structured and crystallized that it takes a great deal of maturity and learning to break through it. 

At this point the shell does not always feel like a rigid boundary, but is teeming with aliveness and pulsing with desires. There is a distinct dynamism to the experience of the self, but as an instinctual and primitive force, it is loosely structured and poorly channeled. The impulsiveness and uncontrollability of the libidinal ego and its passionately overwhelming nature can dominate the student’s experience here. The student generally finds this transformation exciting and promising, especially if she has had mostly a schizoid kind of personality. Hence, it might take a lot of experience, sincerity, and discrimination for her to begin to feel this sense of self as dystonic to her well-being and to see that it alienates her from her essential nature. If she remains sincerely dedicated to her inquiry, she finds that the instinctual drivenness characteristic of her libidinal ego makes her less transparent to the purity and subtlety of essential nature. She sees now that these instinctual drives tend to fixate her consciousness and direct it in a certain prejudiced direction, which clouds her clarity. These drives confuse truth with falsehood and disorient her in her quest for self-realization. The drives, especially the primitive oral ones, tend to orient the self outward, towards promising objects, and away from itself and its beingness. This outward orientation is one of the most basic and stubborn characteristics of the libidinal ego and becomes one of the main barriers to self-realization. Self-realization involves emotional and spiritual self-sufficiency, while the libidinal ego is totally governed by the attitude that all goodness and nourishment come from outside, as if one were an empty stomach. This outward orientation, coupled with insatiable hunger, automatically disconnects the self from the stillness of its beingness, leading to narcissistic alienation.