The commitment to the truth that appears as determination manifests as a steadfastness in all the principles of inquiry. We are committed to remaining open and finding the truth. And we are committed to this openness through approaching the process without prejudice, without a position, without a preference about the truth that arises. This attitude will protect us from the tendency to manipulate our experience in order to accommodate a prescribed goal. So we are steadfast not only in the sense that we continue investigating, but we also continue to be interested and open in our investigation. Even though our experience might be difficult sometimes and the truth may be slow to reveal itself, we will stay with the inquiry. We might stop and rest, but we will come back to it from another angle, willing to experiment and curious about what we find.

One cannot look at oneself with any prejudice, opinion, attitude, expectation or assumptions without losing objectivity. One must approach the experience wanting nothing and expecting nothing. The only motivation that can work is the innate and spontaneous love of truth for its own sake. If one wants truth because it feels good or is going to lead to a good result, or if one wants the truth because it will relieve one's suffering, then one is already prejudiced and cannot be objective. So for there to be absorption, absolute objectivity is required.

When we use the word "prejudice," we don't mean just its common restricted usage: having fixed ideas about a particular group, race, religion, or set of beliefs. Prejudice, as we are using it, means anything that distorts the objective perception of reality. In other words we consider prejudice anything that determines the attitude of a person that is not totally in accord with what actually is.

Many authors on inner development write about the void, or ego death, as if it were one definite experience that ends the ego identity once and for all. This is false and misleading. Ego death is a repeated, and in time a continual, experience. The void is a repeated and deepening perception. Writing about it as if it were one definitive experience that will completely end the individual's identification, and the accompanying suffering, in one shot is not only inaccurate, it is irresponsible and cruel. It will prejudice the student of inner development to seek a perfection or a kind of completeness that is unrealistic and will only add to the attachment to the identifications and to the already existing suffering. Every realized human being continues to work on inner development. There is no end to the development and unfolding of essence. This development proceeds by exposing more and more, perhaps in time very subtle aspects of the personality. After the basic identification with personality is broken, the process of dissolving the subtler aspects of the self-image usually becomes easier. It is a continual dissolution of the boundaries of self-image, resulting in more expansion. It is not that personality is gone and now essence develops. It is rather that the more essence develops, the more personality is exposed and its boundaries dissolved. The fulfillment and expansion of essence is endless and boundless.

Understanding attachment, and the freedom from attachment that arises through the impact of nonconceptual presence, liberates the heart from its habit of orienting according to fixed preferences. The heart becomes transparent to the operation of essential intelligence, functioning from a ground of nonattachment. Its love and joy are now free, totally unattached. It can love fully without having to possess what it loves, liberating its joy and delight, which become the celebration of Reality, immaculate presence, and pristine awareness. The soul learns from direct experience that nonattachment is nothing but the nonconceptual presence in the heart, as the heart of enlightenment, the crystal heart. Such heart responds openly, spontaneously, without premeditation or prejudice. It responds without hesitation to the objective needs of the situation, with a nonconceptual intelligence that needs no inner recognition. As the discriminating mind dissolves under the impact of nonconceptual presence the dichotomies merge into each other, and all polarities reveal their underlying unity as the uniformly blissful field of awareness.

Fixed, rigid, and inaccurate impressions constrain the soul's receptivity to her potential to be prejudiced exclusively toward the elements of this potential that are consonant with the rigidity, fixation, and falseness. The soul has the potential to be false, to manifest rigid and fixed forms, opaqueness, dullness, and darkness.