The Point Diamond shows the way to your true center, but not by moving you to some other place. The Point Diamond teaching is: Sink into where you are as completely as possible and understand it with precision; this will reveal each subsequent layer, quality, or dimension of your nature. And each next step is your next step, not someone else's and not toward an idea of where you think you should be. The perceived movement inward is actually your soul becoming more transparent to her inner nature, shifting you into new forms of experience. Another stream, which Hameed called the subtle process, intertwined without dipping into the absence of the Absolute. He saw this as spiritualizing the soul further, meaning that her very fabric was becoming more rarefied as it transformed from a plasmatic, flowing presence to a more chiffon texture. It felt like an angelic presence, delicate and subtle. This rendered the soul so fine that it became subsumed into Absolute empty, crystalline absence, becoming a completely transparent lens for the Absolute . . . . . . Thus, while the soul can totally blend with the transcendent absence of the Absolute, it can also appear in this space-time universe and do the bidding of the Absolute.

During the second journey, you need to trust that there is nothing to do but stay with the thread. The question of trust activates the specific issue that makes it difficult to stay with the thread. The specific issue of any essential aspect is the issue that arises in everyone regardless of personal history, as a barrier against realizing that aspect. The specific issue for the Point Diamond is the belief that you need to be someplace in particular. “Maybe I should be experiencing the mystery. I should be in the unchanging silence beyond all of appearance. That’s realization.” No! Realization is knowing where you truly are, not experiencing some state that you can only sometimes reach. The point is that the dynamism is manifesting its pure quality within your mandala in a specific form, with a specific quality, for an intelligent reason. Dynamism has its own purposes in presenting itself within you the way it does. You can say, “No, that’s not what I want,” but this comes from a will disconnected from the Divine Will. Because of this self-centered willfulness, it is said in some of the theistic traditions that harmony with the Divine Will is a higher realization than God realization. Going along with where Being puts you is a much deeper realization than just becoming intimate with the wholeness of Being.

Comparative judgment is a big barrier. It is a very powerful barrier even though it is very subtle. But subtle doesn’t mean unimportant. This barrier affects your state, your experience, and even your perception. It pushes you this way and that way. It is a big veil over your perception that makes it impossible for you to realize where you are. So if we understand and embrace the attitude of open and open-ended inquiry, and if we integrate this dimension we’re discussing, the dimension of the Point Diamond, we are not concerned whether where we are is better or worse than where someone else is. Someone else’s experience can actually become a source of learning rather than generating comparative judgment and rejection of oneself or the other. When someone expresses something that you don’t know, that can help you be open to other possibilities. In fact, when you’re curious about what you are hearing and learning, the communication will influence you, and your state will shift one way or another as you consider both that influence and your own experience.

The wisdom of the point diamond is not only a matter of finding where one is and abiding in it, but of continuing to be where one is. In other words, it is the wisdom of abiding in the flow of one’s experience. It is first the recognition of the thread of one’s unfoldment, as the thread of where one is. This is the clear discriminated experience and understanding of the flow of one’s experience. And it happens that when we do not manipulate our experience, consciously or unconsciously, it simply unfolds and reveals the mysteries of our Being. Since the optimizing intelligence is free to unfold the form of the experience of the soul, it reveals her nature in its various aspects and dimensions, all the way to the absolute, and further into the journey of descent. So the surrender to where we are quickly unfolds our experience into a continuity of being, which becomes a continuing self-revelation of true nature. The important realization and wisdom in this diamond vehicle, which makes it quite helpful as a preparation for the journey of descent, is that we learn not to be attached to any particular state or condition, not even that of the absolute. We learn to flow with whatever the logos of our true nature manifests in our experience, and learn to respect and appreciate any arising state without a preference, comparative judgment, or view of an end state of realization. We become free from our conceptualizing mind and the ideals it uses to constrain and channel the flow of our experience. We become contented with whatever state into which the logos manifests our experience. Our experience becomes the clear, precise, and discriminated awareness of the flow of where we are, as the continuity of self-realization.

Another name for the teaching of the Point Diamond could be the teaching of the freedom of movement of the assemblage point. The notion of the assemblage point is a central part of the teachings of Don Juan as related by Carlos Castaneda in his books. According to Don Juan, reality is composed of many bands, dimensions, or rays of manifestation. You experience yourself at any given moment in one or a cluster of these bands. The band where the ego normally crystallizes is where the assemblage point is fixed. The teaching is to discover how to free yourself from this fixation—how to move your assemblage point without constraint—so that your perception becomes liberated, thus allowing you to roam through the experiential bands and be open to experiencing the totality of your potential.

We can also call the Point Diamond realization the teaching of the personal thread, in the sense that your lifeline can be seen as the thread of your evolution, of your unfoldment. If you really investigate, inquire into, and understand your situation fully, you can find out at any moment where your thread is, which is where you are experientially. A central issue that arises in finding and aligning with your personal thread is the nature of external influence. How is your relationship to your own unfolding experience affected (or controlled) by the books you read, the people you listen to, even the teaching you are following? How can you be true to exactly where you are at the present moment without being influenced by beliefs, suggestions, and ideas absorbed in the past? This issue helps us see that the personal thread’s being free from influence is ultimately the same thing as the freedom of movement of the assemblage point. The ability of your assemblage point to move freely is what allows your personal thread to be free from influence. Thus, this can also be seen as the teaching of freedom from influence. This teaching provides us with an understanding of influence and what it means to be free from its limitations. When you have this understanding, you are able to fully realize the uniqueness of your personal thread.

A particular diamond vehicle appears and functions as a steppingstone toward the journey of descent. We refer to this diamond vehicle as the point diamond, which is basically the appearance of presence in the form of a faceted diamond, except that its center is occupied by the point of essence, the essential identity. The faceted diamond can assume any of the qualities or colors of the essential aspects, but with the point of light and presence always at its center. The point diamond vehicle continues the process of self-realization of essential presence, which is begun by the integration of the essential identity of essence. The integration of essential identity gives the soul the capacity for the experience of self-realization, the ability to be and recognize herself as the presence of true nature itself. The point diamond is the clear and precise recognition and understanding of oneself as the essential presence. It is conscious and discriminated self-realization, being essential presence inseparable from knowing it as one’s nature. The wisdom of this diamond vehicle is the recognition and appreciation of one’s uniqueness, and unique realization. But this manifests specifically as the recognition and appreciation of where one is. In other words, to authentically be oneself is to abide in what the logos’s dynamism of Being happens to be manifesting as one’s identity at the moment.

We can call this segment of work by different names, each of which gives us an initial impression of what the Point Diamond teaching is about. We can call it the work on the lifeline. The term “lifeline” originated as part of Einstein’s relativity theory; it refers to an event curve in Minkowski space. Minkowski space, named after the Russian mathematician, is the four-dimensional time-space continuum in which our life happens, in the sense that at any moment, you find yourself at a certain location in space and time. In other words, you are always physically locatable in Minkowski space. So your life is physically composed of a series of these locator points in space-time. When you connect the points, you get a line called your lifeline. Every physical object has its lifeline. The teaching we are discussing concerns more than your physical body, so it is related to a different kind of Minkowski space—a spiritual or inner Minkowski space. Thus, the lifeline we are exploring is not only your location in time and space, but your location in terms of where you are in your experience; it is the lifeline of your soul’s unfoldment. You can always find yourself in a certain state, or experiential configuration, at any point of your unfoldment. Your soul’s phenomenological configuration in any moment corresponds to the location in the space dimension of Minkowski space, and the point where you are in your unfoldment corresponds to the location in the time dimension. Understanding the significance of these correspondences becomes the teaching of the personal lifeline.