To have the quality of openness is to let something that you are not directing come out and emerge by itself. You’re not saying, “No, what’s next is a pomegranate.” How can you know? If you’re a tree, you don’t know what’s going to come out of you. A human being can predict that a pomegranate will appear on a pomegranate tree, but the tree itself doesn’t know that. Let’s say that after a while you see that you just want love; that’s what you really want. But love as you know it is an emotional thing, an emotional kind of excitement or high. To let yourself change, maybe you have to experience love as a drop of honey inside your heart. You may say, “No, there’s no such thing as honey in the heart. Bees make honey. I use it on my toast, on my granola.” You don’t allow yourself something else: the possibility that at the next stage of development, your heart is full of honey. If you don’t allow that, you’ll never experience the deeper, finer quality of love. So, you need to be willing not only to allow your dreams and your self-image to change completely, you also need to allow your inner experience, your inner sensations, to change in kind and in quality. Otherwise you’ll stop your growth. After a long process of growth, you will discover that some of the deepest and most cherished inner sensations you can have are sensations or experiences of being yourself, the experience of your true identity or Essence.

Through my turning towards the absolute, and loving it exclusively, risking the loss of the divine being and the unity of existence, the absolute reveals itself as the inner nature of this unity. The immense silence discloses itself as the self of the divine being. I recognize that what I love most is the essence of the divine, the very self of god. It is the divine ipseity, the self of everything: absolute blackness, complete annihilation, beyond being and nonbeing. The absolute is majesty; when it manifests its crystal brilliancy it also has beauty. The beauty evokes passionate love; the crystal form of love attains a deep pomegranate color. The feeling is more than love; it is more like bedazzlement. The beauty bedazzles and enchants. I feel a deep devotional and passionate love, and desire for it to take me and completely annihilate me. That is what I have always wanted.

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.