The personal mind focuses on certain segments of the Nous and takes these to be the totality of reality. Mostly, it focuses on the physical universe. We have seen how the nature of childhood development tends to lead to this orientation. Because of this physical orientation, the personal mind normally is not grounded in the essential dimensions. It is based on and prejudiced towards the most concrete and localized level of Nous, rather than the dimensions which include more refined awareness. The personal mind perceives mostly from the perspective of the pleasures and pains of the body, even when it is affected by Essence. The self-images that determine ego reactions and feelings, even perceptions, are based on identification with the body. Thus the personal mind doesn’t attend to deeper elements at subtler levels of the Nous or Universal Mind, such as Essence and Beingness. We need a lot of education to learn to take those realms into consideration. 

So to recapitulate, we need objective perception to understand that Essence is the answer, Essence is the fulfillment, Essence is the Ridhwan. And from that will result the true value of Essence in yourself, in others, everywhere. Then, with that understanding and valuing, there will arise the true discipline, the true protection for Essence and for the essential life. The world we live in does not support this. People around us do not support this. There are pressures everywhere against this orientation. When you experience Essence, it needs to be protected. You have to find your own citadel, your own fortress. Your citadel has to do with the true discipline; it is the true discipline. There is an actual aspect of Essence that we call the citadel, which is the protection for your essence so that it will be preserved and develop and can be used for others. This is the right way of living. It has to be there. It’s not that you’ll experience your essence and automatically get out of the swamps. You have to take action, to live your life in accordance with the truth, the truth of your essence, the truth of who you are, your situation, what your limitations are. These need to be taken into consideration in the way you live your life. It’s not going to just happen—there are too many external forces against it. It is your responsibility to protect and guard and preserve your essence, your true nature. You couldn’t do that as a child because you were totally dependent, but now you have the chance to preserve and protect your essence as you experience it. 

Practices that aim to put you in a particular state have a whole mind-set attached to them, which is the mind-set of that particular state. The problem is that this can become your mind-set, providing you with a mental framework, which means a particular orientation toward your experience. And we want to be free from any mental framework. So true meditation, true practice, according to the Diamond Approach, consists of following your thread, which means being where you are and continuing to be where you are without trying to make your experience go in any particular way. This requires practice because most of the time, you do not know where you are, you do not understand where you are, or you are fighting and rejecting where you are. This is the normal state of the ego-self, for the ego is always trying to get someplace, to make itself be a certain way. The ego-self is constantly judging and rejecting its arising state and trying to fit itself into a certain ideal. It is not just being where it is and allowing itself to unfold freely. As a result, it does not understand where it is, for it is invested in being somewhere in particular, being a certain way, or in satisfying a particular ideal. And even if this ideal is taken from spiritual teachings, the same mechanism of ego activity is in operation. Trapped in the ego-self, you do not trust that Being itself will take you where you need to go. 

As our engagement with the path matures and develops, we realize that practice is a way of life, a way of being. This kind of orientation, this kind of commitment, requires a motive that is independent of external things, a motive that arises from the enlightenment drive, from the action of true nature manifesting through us as a dynamic force to reveal itself. So we recognize at some point that our motivation needs to be grounded in and originate from this place beyond the individual soul, beyond the individual self. That makes our motivation true. True motivation expresses itself in the interest, the love, the compassion, the service, the devotion, the respect, and the appreciation that we feel for the truth of reality. We have seen that the enlightenment drive can manifest through all three centers and, specifically, as continual practice in its expression through the belly center. The liberation of the enlightenment drive is not simply a matter of experiencing it. It’s a matter of the enlightenment drive doing its thing, which manifests in us as truly engaging the path, as the unfoldment of experience, and as practicing with the right attitude, whatever form that practice takes. 

Fire or flame usually indicates an aspiration toward something, but this aspiration is originating from the spontaneous depths of the soul and not from the mind. Gold is the color of truth on the dimension of essential experience. Golden flame is then an aspiration toward the truth, and golden fire is a strong aspiration and movement toward truth and away from falsehood and lies. This is a wonderful orientation. It is actually the specific orientation of our work. And we see that this orientation cannot come from the mind—it has to be real; it has to originate from the essential depths of our soul. The mind does not know what the soul needs to aspire to because the mind is influenced from outside. But the essential depths of the soul can be the source of true aspiration without the mind knowing what the aspiration is toward. The flame can be of other colors, with each indicating different manifestations of Essence. The flame can be luminous black, for instance, indicating the aspiration toward peace and inner stillness; or it can be a brilliant flame, indicating the spontaneous aspiration of the soul toward the true intelligence of Being. The flame can manifest in any of the various inner centers. It can manifest in the heart, for example, indicating the aspiration of the heart and feelings. Or it can arise in the belly center—the kath, or hara—and in this way orient actions. It is the aspiration toward true action. 

Let’s investigate this dichotomy that many people doing spiritual work experience, between the drab, ordinary, unexciting, old world around us—the physical world—and the spiritual. We think that it is spiritual to move away from the material world. To approach the Work this way presents us with a big problem. We want the Work to make us successful and secure in the physical world, and at the same time we want a spiritual life that has nothing to do with that, that is beyond it, that is inner, that is more spiritual, that is not physical. This is a split orientation. However, this split orientation contains a seed of truth that is not apparent to us. For instance, you believe that God is within, or God is over there, somewhere beyond the world. You feel as if this truth is something mysterious like a goody you’ll find when you bite into one of your chocolates, or by doing strange things to your brain like ingesting some substance. It is true that you can find a God in heaven, or you can find God inside your heart. But from the perspective of the teaching that we will work with here, these experiences happen within your mind, within your knowledge. They are not yet the objective truth, not yet the experience of awakening. To remain attached to your own mind is to be what I call the worshipper of personal beliefs. If you pursue inner experiences, you are what I call the seeker after sensation. If you want the Work to make you more comfortable in the world, more successful, famous, or rich, I call you then the one who wants materialistic gains. Ultimately, they are all the same. You remain the little self that wants something, that feels deficient, small, and empty, and wants some kind of reality to support it, whether that reality is God, Essence, truth, or whatever. 

The attitude of rejection is something we need to understand. It’s not just a mental orientation. When the soul is saying no and denying a part of itself, the attitude of rejection is a reflection of the same kind of violent reaction that causes us to throw something up. Because we know how much we dislike something when we vomit it up, we can appreciate that we unconsciously fear such a violent reaction being aimed at us, and we avoid rejection internally (from our superego) as well as externally (from others). When we reject something in our experience, that’s what we’re doing—we’re trying to throw out part of ourselves. We’re not just getting rid of it by taking it out and throwing it away; we are trying to throw it away with an emotionally violent action similar to vomiting it out. You want to vomit up yourself, or part of yourself. It’s that devastating. So, that’s really what’s deadly about comparative moral judgment. It becomes the ground upon which we want to divest ourselves of something, and the way we do that damages our soul. Rejection, disapproval, or looking down on something that we think doesn’t measure up are not just detached positions we take about our experience; they are violent, destructive behaviors we use to harm ourselves. 

The practices you have learned here will help you to go beyond the usual level of experience. You cannot establish your inner orientation with the mind, but the heart knows when you are headed in the right direction. The mind becomes quieter. This doesn’t mean that you get stupid; in becoming still, the mind opens to a new dimension of itself to assist the heart on the quest for truth, so we venture into unknown territory and begin to learn to know in new ways. Our desire is not only to feel the truth but also to know it completely and to be taken in by it totally. With its innate intelligence and capacity for discrimination, the mind works in partnership with the heart. The heart with its love is what stirs within the soul and makes us want to be nearer. The heart is what feels closeness and distance. The love is what melts the boundaries and awakens the soul to her Beloved and the desire for union with the divine. And the mind plays the important role of discriminating the experience and clarifying the consciousness through understanding. To truly know our nature, we need to be and know it fully, and at some point we realize that we cannot separate the two. To know Being is to be it. To be it is to feel it and know it as one unified phenomenon. Then the heart and mind are united in their action and function. The heart says, “Yes, I love you.” The mind says, “I want to completely know what I love.” It is not enough simply to be in love and feel the love. You want to know what you love. You love to know what you love. 

The love of truth, which the soul has learned in the course of her inner journey and through which she has invited the assistance of the diamond guidance, comes up against this basic human orientation. The soul recognizes that to continue to love truth selflessly requires a huge shift in her view of life and her orientation in living it. She sees that truth must come before pleasure, and that she must look inward for what she needs. Most human beings are not willing to make this shift, and are not even convinced of its truth or necessity. The conventionally conditioned soul is not only wedded to the orientation of seeking pleasure externally, but this orientation is part of a larger one, which is her allegiance to the world and loyalty to its view. This orientation has its roots in the soul’s very early experience of receiving pleasurable gratification from her mother. This early gratification creates an amazingly deep bond, such that the soul grows up deeply loyal to the mother who satisfied her needs and desires. Every soul with normal ego development grows up deeply, though often unconsciously, loyal to her mothering person, the first love object and object of gratification. Thus the soul has a much deeper loyalty to her initial object of gratification than most of us suspect. The power of this attachment does not become clear until it is brought up in deep levels of the soul’s inner journey. In our work this issue arises in connection with the experience and integration of the diamond vehicle called the Markabah, the diamond vehicle having to do with pleasure. The soul’s loyalty to the historical object of gratification and to the orientation associated with it is libidinal, emotional, and philosophical. The mother, or breast, was the first external object and hence the prototype of such objects. Each time the soul relates to an object of gratification, or a love object, the soul cannot help but relate to it in a way that is similar to how she related to her mother. She values it as a source of pleasurable satisfaction and fulfillment; at the same time, she has a deep and committed allegiance to it. But the fact that the first object of gratification is an object that the soul comes to recognize as separate from her and outside her, deeply conditions her to expect pleasure, satisfaction, and fulfillment only from external objects. This expectation becomes the libidinal foundation of the materialistic and worldly view of reality, the view that the animal soul adheres to totally. 

If we are to allow ourselves to unfold, the only thing we can do is to be completely where we are, to be present in exactly the spot that is manifesting in this moment; and if we are genuinely present, the next movement will unfold and we will find out what it is. So the Holy Plan can only be revealed by going through it—you cannot direct your unfoldment. In other words, to allow your soul to unfold, your orientation must be to be present in the now, and to discover the movement of the unfoldment of presence by being it. This is the Holy Work. You can only discover your place in the Holy Plan by living it, in the present, moment by moment. We ordinarily think that a sense of orientation comes through knowing what to do, which direction to take. This implies that you know where you are going. True orientation, from the perspective of Being, however, is just presence itself. The now is orientation; the only real possible orientation is presence in the nowness. We cannot orient ourselves to the future because we don’t know where our experience is going to go. If we are present in the moment, that presence will unfold from instant to instant, thereby creating its own direction. When you are in the moment, being the presence that is unfolding, that unfoldment determines your actions, and your actions will feel just right, right to the point, because you are not separate from your Being and your action is completely unified with the presence itself. Your actions then are nothing but the unfoldment of Being.

Understanding the orientation of continual practice, the attitude of devotion to what is real, gets us closer to the mystery of the relationship between practice and realization. When we first learn to practice, we usually have an experience of ourselves practicing. As we come to more thoroughly understand the nature of the self and of reality, our sense of self transforms until, at some point, we realize that when one is practicing, when one is meditating, when one is inquiring, when one is chanting, it is not one particular individual that is practicing, it is the totality of all that there is that is practicing. The more continual our practice and the more unflagging our orientation toward reality, the more our understanding of who or what practices can shift from an identified self to the totality of reality. The entirety of all and everything is practicing as the individual is practicing. As the individual meditates, we learn that it is Living Being in its totality that is actually meditating. Living Being is the beingness and aliveness and dynamism of everything and everyone; it is reality living its life. We will further elaborate on Living Being throughout the book. For now, the expression simply signals that reality is unified in ways that are not apparent except in realization. 

Most commonly, what we identify with is our future orientation. And that is why we keep our attention on the secondary manifestations of our experience. The primary component of our experience often doesn’t even have a chance to impact us, much less the actual reality of presence at the heart of it. Think about it. You still believe that you know there is going to be a tomorrow and that expectation becomes a controlling aspect of your experience. Perhaps you have an appointment tomorrow, so you do need to consider the future in that sense. But that is not the same thing as your consciousness levitating out of the now and jumping to the future. We don’t need to do that in order to be efficient. We can still reside in the present, enjoying the moment—because really, that is all that we have. The future might never come—who knows? So just like anything else that may arise in our experience, we don’t have to go along with our future orientation. When we notice it coming up, we don’t have to believe it, we don’t have to take it seriously, we don’t have to identify with it. But not identifying doesn’t mean pushing away. Instead, we can recognize, “Who I truly am is a being of light.” When we know this, we don’t get caught up in all the obstacles we encounter. Not because we are avoiding them or denying them or pushing them away, but because those obstacles actually don’t exist for beings of light. For a being of light, what you are right this very moment is all you have. It is in the presence of this moment, and only in the presence of this moment, that we can be where we are, that we can be ourselves, that we can be real. It is as simple as that. 

Let’s give a few examples of how being identified with your personality distorts reality and results in suffering. Let’s take the issue of proving yourself in the world, of being independent, on your own, strong, successful, making a place for yourself. That’s a big concern, a major preoccupation. Nearly everyone has this goal. This can be an aim that comes from an essential orientation or a personality orientation. There is a big, big difference. Establishing yourself in the world and being independent means building the personal aspect of Essence. It is an inner accomplishment. It comes from a very deep desire to actualize who you really are. Being who you really are means being free of all the identifications from the past that have built your false sense of identity; it does not depend on what you do in the world. What you do in the world can be an expression of who you are, but it does not define you. When you are your Personal Essence, your own true sense of identity, anything you do will have an essential orientation. You usually think that the job you choose, whatever it is—gardener, physicist, mother—will make you feel who you really are. But that means you are identified with being a part of the world. It means there is a distortion of reality. 

The sense of confidence, certainty, meaning, preciousness, and value implicit in the presence of a state of realization is not necessarily recognized. You just don’t question; you just live life as if it is precious and has meaning. There isn’t necessarily a particular meaning you can articulate. That’s not the point. The sense of meaning is there because there is self-realization. You are there. Your very reality is present and you are it. The very reality of you, or whatever dimension of reality you are realized on at that time, is the significance, the meaning, the preciousness, and it gives everything about you and your world significance, meaning, and value. When this sense of self-realization is absent you usually experience meaninglessness and emptiness in yourself and in your life. Nothing matters, nothing is important. You don’t count. You don’t know what you want to do, nothing that you want to do is important. You don’t have any sense of what’s right or what’s not right; there is no innate sense of orientation, of direction, or of what is valuable to do. The state of self-realization is better known by its absence than by its presence. When it is absent, you feel that you don’t know who you are, you don’t seem to exist. You feel that there is nothing to you: you don’t matter, you aren’t important. You feel insignificant, your life feels insignificant, you don’t even know what you want to do. You wonder why you should even live. A person can become suicidal at this point. Why live? You feel that there is no point in living. In the absence of self-realization you feel a sense of hopelessness about yourself, your life and all of existence. 

It is possible to see that the reason you’re suffering is that you’re always filling your self with the activities of the positions you take. When this is happening you cannot experience things freshly, directly, purely. You even experience your body as heavy and sluggish. If you allow emptiness, your body can become light, rather than a hindrance or a boundary for your experience. Your body is your orientation in the physical universe but your experience does not have to be limited by its shape or contour. You are basically an openness and a sensitivity which has no point of view, which is not restricted by any boundary of any kind—emotional, essential, physical or mental. When you allow yourself to be that openness and freedom, you will experience yourself as giving, as a flow of love. The point of view of the ego is what stops love and the true abundance that flows like a fountain. The fountain isn’t thinking of giving or not giving. The fountain is just there, flowing. A point of view, which is automatically a restriction, blocks the heart. The heart cannot pump its essential juices. As long as you believe you are a separate person with boundaries, with the attitude of getting things and protecting your self, you will block love. Love destroys boundaries. Love has nothing to do with you or me. Love is just the activity of that creativity in that openness. Love is the outcome of non-restriction, of freedom. When the body and the mind are not restricted by that point of view, the harmony of the body and the mind will be expressed in a lovingness, an abundance.