From this perspective, there is no difference between one person and another because their source is identical. Neither is there really a difference between ego and enlightenment; neither has anything to do with you. If you are ego, then ego is what's being generated. If you are enlightened, then enlightenment is what's being generated. If you are ignorant, then ignorance is what's being generated. We get scared sometimes when we think of things this way, when someone points out this deep truth. This truth confronts your deepest convictions about yourself, about your life, and about reality. But that fear itself is simply the flow of the pattern at that moment. There's no escape, you see. Whether you surrender or you revolt, you have nothing to do with it. You are being produced at every moment. Your resistance is being produced, and your surrender is being produced. Your knowledge is being produced, and your ignorance is being produced.

The "true pattern" of the self refers to the intrinsic possibilities one is born with. It is considered a reflection of an archetypal reality. This concept corresponds to our view that the soul has a blueprint, analogous to the DNA in the cell nucleus, which shapes the pattern of development.

From the point of view of the development of the soul as the unfolding of a true pattern or blueprint, narcissism results from disturbances of the unfoldment of a person's intrinsic pattern, as well as the dissociation of this unfoldment from the essential ground and nature of the self.

You are told to do a certain practice that will lead to a certain realization. However, being told to do a certain practice is actually simply the instantaneous flow of reality, like the instant-by-instant flow of light and sound in a movie. Whether you do the practice or not, what happens is also the instantaneous flow. If you do the practice, then that flow has a pattern. The flow deepens and changes. These phenomena appear to happen in time, but actually we don’t need our assumptions about time to see the flow and harmony in the pattern of what happens. Logically, you could see that flow happens without time.

In experiencing the dimension of the logos we experience a boundless presence, transparent and full of being. We see all of manifestation, both physical and spiritual, as manifest within it, constituted by it. We see all of manifestation as the details and specifics of the logos. These details and specifics form a universal and infinite pattern. It is one pattern, interconnected and indivisible. Discerning this pattern we recognize the universe of experience in its totality, for all objects of the universe are sub-patterns within the overall pattern. At the same time, the pattern is in flow, in progress, its flow detailing the development and evolution of the universe. The flow is an unfolding of the presence that not only generates the forms of the world but their changes and movements. In other words, the pattern is dynamic and evolving. Putting it in the language of modern science, the pattern fills the four dimensions of space-time. More exactly, since there is no time in the usual sense here, the pattern is not only of the details defining the objects but also of the details determining their changes and movements. Furthermore, this pattern includes the invariant patterns that govern all natural and spiritual processes. For instance, it includes the pattern that objects fall toward the earth, detailing the laws of gravity. It also includes the pattern that when a person identifies with a particular self-concept, they become dissociated from the immediacy of their essential presence. To summarize, the logos is not only the dynamic force generating existence, but the pattern of this existence that reflects the pattern of this generation. The logos pattern, in other words, is the original order of all things.

Happiness, value, and pleasure are not the result of anything. These qualities are part of our fundamental nature. If we simply allow ourselves to be, this is our natural experience. You are the most precious thing in the universe, but you behave as if you are the poorest, most trivial thing there is. It doesn’t really take much to see this. Just stop the whirlwind that goes on. Let yourself relax and be there. You can allow yourself to do it wherever you are. You don’t have to be in the Canary Island to be happy. You don’t have to be with someone you are in love with, and who loves you, to be happy. Putting these conditions on your happiness is a degrading way of looking at yourself. Sure, you can be happy in the Canaries or with someone you love, but how about the rest of the time? You abandon yourself, then start looking for satisfaction. You feel that something’s missing, so you are always searching, becoming more and more frantic as all the things you acquire or accomplish don’t fill you. This whole pattern occurs because you have stopped being. If you just let yourself be there, there is nowhere to go, nothing to look for, because it’s all there. It is not that some people are satisfied by being and others not; no, we all feel satisfied when we are ourselves. It is a quality of our human nature. It is our natural endowment. It is the meaning of being a human being. The only thing we need do is to let ourselves be.

We humans tend to believe in miracles instead of seeing that what we call a miracle is actually a glimpse into what is real. We distance ourselves from the miraculous by remaining in our conventional sense of who we are. We continue to be defined by our past experiences, so that what our parents believed and taught us and what we have learned about this world and the universe dominate and limit our experiences. Our minds pattern our world and keep it tightly circumscribed, limited to the most physical, sensate experiences. Parents, other family members, and teachers are forever present in our minds and always will be, as long as we relate to the world as they taught us to. They are part of a larger worldview and live on within it as part of us, limiting our freedom and restricting our perceptions from expanding. Even after these people have died, we are in constant relationship to them in our minds; they are still there, patterning our experience of ourselves. Our images of them and our images of ourselves are mixed with feelings and sensations. This is all part of the patterned responses we come to know as relationship. Not only is our worldview patterned, our relationships are also patterned through the veils of past experiences and learning. We relate to others through this veil.

One reason we don’t want to see this truth is that we often believe that if we choose to live in accordance with the truth of Essence, we will lose all the goodies of life that we’re attached to. We are so accustomed to looking at our lives from the perspective of getting things from the outside, we believe that if we cease to count on this pattern, we will lose them all. This is not so. In fact, if all your actions and desires, all the aspects of your life are subordinated to the truth of Essence, you can have what you want in your life. You can be famous, rich, sexy, have a family, a career, all these things. And you can enjoy them in the fullness of Essence, rather than always trying to get more and fearing the loss of what you have. There is no conflict between living the essential life and getting what you want in the world. In fact, when we are living according to our essence, it is possible finally to love our lives and the things in our lives. But if we value external things over our essence, then we shut off the part that can enjoy these things. The heart of joy, what we call the yellow heart or the bright sun, becomes sunny when it is turned toward Essence. When it is turned somewhere else, it is dark. It’s that simple.

This specific function has a lot to do with the fact that the Essential Identity is both essential identity and, phenomenologically, a point. Its existence as identity and as a point of presence are two facets of the same phenomenon, and this two-faceted nature affects our experience in a particular way. The more we have realized the Essential Identity, the easier it is for us to get straight to the point, which is the heart of the matter, which is the meaning of what’s going on. It’s true that all kinds of things are going on at every moment, but our experience is not haphazard or chaotic. No, the totality of experience has a pattern, and the pattern has a meaning. It has a point. It has a meaning that has something to do with who and what we are, with our relationship to our life, to our true nature and our evolution, and to where we are in the stream of life. All of this together makes one unified whole. When we get the insight into what that pattern of meaning is, we feel, “Aha, I got the point.” If we have difficulty experiencing our true self, it will be very difficult to get the point. So being able to experience the essential Point makes it easier for us to get to the point of any situation or experience.

As an aspect of essence pushes forward toward consciousness, it acts on the personality. Essence is a force, and the sector of the personality related to the emerging aspect of essence becomes stronger and more forceful in order to be able to resist the emerging essence and to keep it out of consciousness. The very existence of the personality depends on unconsciousness, on maintaining its established patterns and conditioning. The personality does not want to change. As essence emerges, the conflict between essence and personality will be magnified and become more obvious. The conflict between the unconditioned part and the conditioned part becomes the focus of attention. The relevant sector of the personality will manifest more and more strongly now in consciousness, until it becomes imperative for us to look at it and deal with it in a real and effective way. It becomes necessary for us to understand and resolve the issues related to this part of the personality. To avoid or ignore the issues becomes more difficult than to face them. Here, essence acts as a perfect teacher. It does not, like most systems of teaching, try to make us deal with sectors of the personality that we personally experience as syntonic to our wellbeing. It actually disrupts our habitual equilibrium. Forcefully but gently, and in a balanced way, it reveals each sector of the personality as alien and contradictory to our best interests. No human teacher can be so exact, so effective, and so appropriate.

Doing the work is a pattern unfolding. There is the pattern of not doing the work and there is the pattern of doing the work. If you don't do the work, a certain pattern unfolds. If you do the work, a certain but different pattern unfolds. Your decision to do the work is not your decision. Your decision is produced. Because you're still not awake, you're happy about the decision. Your happiness too is part of the pattern. You have nothing to do with it. Your belief that you exist as somebody who still is not awake also is not yours. That belief is being produced too. So one of these days you will see the projector and say, "Aha, I got it! I keep thinking I'm doing this and that, but there is a light over there projecting the whole thing!"

Every day you put the same patterns, same ideas, and same hopes in front of you. They may be modified here and there, but they are basically the same. We carry our past with us. If you look at your life, there is no present, no future; your mind is always in the past. You are furnishing your future, all the time, by continuing your past. Everyone wants to continue in the same way, yet you wonder why your life does not seem fresh or new, why instead, it feels like a swamp. You say you want newness, life, freshness, change, transformation. But this would mean that the past is left in the past. Is it possible for us to be here without the past? What I’m saying is not original. Every spiritual teacher says the same thing: the point is not success or happiness, the point is to be real. I’m saying this now so that you can understand the situation, not so that you do something about it.

We haven’t yet explored the extent to which we try to control things, how much we try to twist reality’s arm. We need to see the situation as completely and as accurately as possible. The problem is not that we want to be happy, but that we are going about it in the wrong way. When we really see that we are going about it in the wrong way, we quit. And then life can unfold on its own. We cannot make it unfold. We can quit our rejection, our judgment, our intolerance, but we will quit these patterns only when we completely and totally see what they are doing— that they are hurting us. We still don’t understand that our attitudes, ideas, and beliefs are actually responsible for our suffering. We pay lip service to this idea but we don’t know it completely and totally. So we continue in our old patterns. The work we do here is simply to see the picture completely, seeing exactly what it is you are doing and how that affects reality. This is the way that real freedom, actual change, will come about. To live in freedom and absolute fulfillment, we need a complete, radical shift, and such a shift can occur only when there is a complete understanding of what we are actually doing.