Experience at the nonconceptual dimension of Reality includes all the forms we normally perceive, outer and inner. These include the physical forms, the oceans and mountains, stars and galaxies, trees and animals, molecules and atoms, and so on. They include all our subjective experience: the thoughts, images, feelings, and sensations. But they also include all the spiritual forms, including essential aspects and diamond vehicles. Essential aspects arise at this dimension differentiated, in the sense that they have different colors and textures. Yet, we do not recognize what they are, or what they mean. We cannot, in fact, differentiate them from the physical and emotional forms. We cannot tell that they are pure spiritual qualities and the others are physical or emotional, for all forms of manifestation are nothing but a differentiation of the same reality, nonconceptual presence. In other words, we can experience essential aspects at this level of experience but we will not be able to recognize what they are. We can tell that the pink quality is different from the green one, but we cannot tell that the pink is love and the green is compassion. The recognition of the qualities requires the noetic capacity of the dimension of pure presence.

Love is actually more than one aspect of essence. When love is first discovered, one often feels it as a certain sweetness, a sweet presence which feels fluffy and light. This is one of the simplest and easiest aspects of love to experience, love which feels fluffy and pink. Love is often experienced in this way in the beginning, as a sweet lightness, a softness and a gentleness that melts in you the way cotton candy melts. When someone says, “I love you,” it is often the fluffy pink love they are experiencing. It feels like liking. When you have discovered this loving aspect of essence, this sweetness, fluffiness and softness, you may begin to see the elements the ego attaches to love —need, wanting, desires and preferences. You may find that your personality lets you experience love only with certain people and only under certain conditions. This means that the love aspect of your beingness is connected to certain conditions from the past. Only under these conditions do you allow yourself to feel love.

We do not simply need to be seen; we need to be seen with admiration, kindness, appreciation, love, precision, clarity, joy, excitement, and so on. These needs are totally met when we start seeing ourselves with these qualities, reflecting the presence of these essential qualities in the mirroring awareness. The clear medium then appears with the beautiful yellow of Joy, reflecting seeing ourselves happily; or with the soft pink of Love, reflecting seeing ourselves with sweetness and love; or with the emerald green of Loving Kindness, reflecting seeing ourselves with kindness and sensitivity; or with the deep amber of Value, as we see ourselves with appreciation and esteem; or with the brilliant ruby red of Strength, reflecting seeing ourselves with excitement and aliveness; or with the rich apricot color of Fulfillment, reflecting being fulfilled by seeing ourselves; and so on.

The perception that Being constitutes the totality of everything is what is generally called a mystical experience. Before this, you may have spiritual experiences, but when you experience the oneness and the unity of existence, you are on the level of the mystical. In the dimension of Living Daylight, you experience that everything is made out of love. When you look around you, everything might appear, for example, to be made out of a pink and sweet diamond-like taffy substance, and be pervaded with a wonder, a beauty, and a sweetness.

Take for example the quality of personal love, whose affect is that of liking and appreciation, of recognizing what we love as wonderful and precious. This love is a manifestation of pure consciousness. It is a medium of consciousness conscious of itself. Its experience is the experience of a conscious presence, a presence that knows itself by being itself. Its knowingness is not discursive representational knowing; yet this presence is not only aware of itself as presence, but is also aware of itself as love. Love is a differentiation out of pure conscious presence, where presence now possesses a quality that distinguishes it from other essential differentiations. It is analogous to the differentiation of colored light from white light; it remains light, but manifests as one quality from a spectrum that is implicit and nondifferentiated in white light. Presence is now not only aware of its beingness and hereness, but also of the quality of love. Our consciousness is now manifesting itself, or a region of its expanse, with a quality that appears in all the dimensions of the soul's manifold. It appears in the inner touch sense as a soft and caressing texture, almost like baby skin or talcum powder. It appears in the inner visual sense as a beautiful and luminous pink, either as a shapeless medium or with a shape like a flowing pink stream, a pink cloud, or cotton candy, or a pink rose. It appears in the inner taste sense as a heavenly kind of sweetness, an uplifting taste that makes us realize why we associate love with sweetness. It appears in the inner olfactory sense as a the scent of rose or jasmine, delicate and so transporting. It appears in the inner auditory sense as the gentle delicate buzzing of bees, tinkling of bells, or a melodious enchanting sound.

Let’s take the essential aspect of Love as an example. Love is the experience of the essence of who we are as a pure and authentic presence. It has the feeling tone of liking, of appreciation, which is an enjoyable and pleasurable experiential affect. This pleasurable appreciation becomes more definitely discerned as Love when we recognize the other properties of its presence: when we can taste the exquisite sweetness that is part of the experience of liking or appreciation; when we can sense the softness, smoothness, and lightness of the presence; when we can see the beautiful pink luminosity intrinsic to this feeling. All of these perceptual properties form a unified gestalt that we term the essential aspect of Love. However, the feeling tone is what is more conventionally understood as the experience of Love, and the one that most obviously differentiates it from other qualities. The other properties of taste, color, texture, and so on, are rarely ever known or discerned clearly in everyday experience.

When this instinctual energy is opened, there arises the danger of becoming attached to its exhilarating, passionate aliveness, especially if the individual has lived a controlled and puritanical life. The insight that begins the process of working through this issue is the recognition of projection onto the libidinal object. One may recognize that the good mother or wonderful breast was beautiful and desirable, but the object he sees in his mind does not actually exist in the world. One may see at some point that the beautiful, luscious object, which is the true object of the soul’s libidinal desire, contains all the wonderful, sweet, and fulfilling nectars of the essential heart qualities. The libidinal object turns out to be a strong, alive heart, full of a living presence that contains luscious juices that normally manifest in the heart when it is open to its essential qualities. One may actually see and taste the zesty pomegranate of passionate love, the rich golden honey and milk of satisfying nourishment, the apricot nectar of fulfillment, the luscious orange of essential pleasure, the beautiful fluffy pink of love, and so on.