Spiritual traditions, as well as certain philosophical and psychological bodies of inquiry, have developed substantial bodies of understanding regarding the logical, phenomenological and experiential categories of emptiness and nothingness, as well as of presence and Being. The present work on narcissism begins with the phenomenon of the human being, or soul, as presence, but also passes through a process of de-reification of structures and essences, leading to an appreciation of the primordial emptiness which is a component of Eastern teachings such as Buddhism. Some aspects of the Western philosophical tradition (particularly continental philosophy) have developed an understanding and appreciation of emptiness, but generally without the techniques to actually integrate the awareness of emptiness into our ongoing experience. The understanding of the relationship between narcissism and emptiness in The Point of Existence brings new possibilities for embodiment of this aspect of human wisdom. 

This brings us to the concept of rebirth in relation to the Personal Essence. Rebirth is a recurrent theme in the literature of inner transformation. Inner transformation is primarily a death and rebirth, the death of an old identity and the birth of a new one, on a deeper level of reality. While we can see the realization of each essential aspect as a process of death and rebirth, it is the discovery of the Personal Essence which is actually felt by many students as the birth of who they are. It is the true birth of the Human Being, and is recognized as such by the experiencer himself. If the development of the separate individuality of ego is the psychological birth of the individual, then the realization of the Personal Essence is his essential birth. The death, of course, in this process of rebirth, is the abandoning of ego identifications. In this sense the “birth” of the Personal Essence is fundamentally different from the birth of the ego, which is not preceded by a death but arises out of a state of nondifferentiation. There is no conscious identity preceding ego identity which needs to be dissolved to allow the birth of the ego. However, the birth of ego does mean the loss of contact with Being, as we will see later.

Unlike other aspects of essence, this personal aspect (the pearl) goes through a process of development, growth, and expansion. Here the concepts of development and growth can be seen in their true and literal meaning. This true personality of the being is born, fed, and nourished. It grows, expands, and develops in a very specific sense. It is really the development of essence from being impersonal to being personal. Others might call it God becoming a human person, an individual. Let's try to understand this. One way of understanding the various aspects of essence is to see them as the differentiation of the source. It is like the Gnostic story called the King of Kings. What we call the essence of the essence is the white light, and the aspects of essence are the different colors of the rainbow. The aspect of the essence of the essence, the source, and the various other aspects differentiating from it are all impersonal. When all of these differentiated aspects are realized, they are then integrated in a new synthesis, a synthesis that has a personal characteristic. This integration of all aspects of essence into a new and personal synthesis is the pearl beyond price. So from the undifferentiated source, finally there emerges a synthesis, a rounded personality that is essential. 

Pure Being is seen as the source of the Cosmic Consciousness, which then differentiates further into all the essential aspects. The differentiation finally becomes integrated into the Personal Essence. So the Personal Essence is the individuation of Being through a process of differentiation and integration that is the expression of Love.

The point we want to make here, which no other system or tradition has emphasized, is that although essence as a whole goes through a process of dimming and eventual loss, specific essential aspects have different processes of development and varying vicissitudes. The environment affects essence as a whole, but it affects the different aspects differently. The aspect of the child's environment that finally shuts down the will might be different from the aspect that shuts down joy, for instance. This understanding of the loss of essence is of paramount importance when it comes to the question of techniques for retrieval of essence, as we will show in the next chapter. Of course, ultimately, all aspects of essence must be veiled for some of them to be unconscious. If some aspects remain in the consciousness, they will tend to bring out other aspects spontaneously, except perhaps in instances of severe dissociation and splitting, which are the causes of severe mental pathologies. This is because essence has the characteristic of going deeper and opening whatever reality there is. If one aspect is present, without severe dissociation, it will naturally bring the rest of the aspects to consciousness. 

As you become more acquainted with the sense of stillness and functionality and as you see through the beliefs of needing the old sense of self to do these things, something new can happen. It is a development, a kind of ripening and maturing. In the past few years I’ve been teaching about living your realization, which means living the truth you know. The emptiness is what lives, and to live means to function, to do, and to drive a car. A lot of it is a process of discovery—just as you discovered right now that there is talking even though it is not the usual self that is talking. The difficult thing is how to be this presence while there is functioning. Most people revert to their old self to function because they strongly believe that that self is what does. The practice is how to be this stillness, this kind of consciousness, as you move from one step to the next. 

As I said before, this capacity of presence to discriminate experience transforms life into a process of discovery and revelation. This presence is not our mind, is not our feelings, is not our body, although it makes use of all of these; it is its own truth. It is an intelligence that brings not only discernment and understanding but also creative discrimination. What makes the discrimination creative is that the moment we make a discrimination, we are seeing an implication, which reveals another possibility of experience that opens another insight, another experience, or another whole dimension of knowing and being. To know our core freedom, our primordial freedom, and for it to become a central value, requires a great deal of maturation in our soul. In addition to the discovery of true nature, we need the maturity that allows us to appreciate that kind of freedom. And part of this maturity is the development and refinement of the discriminating capacity of our immediate experience. 

We all live within an inner world of images, thoughts, and memories that shift continually, evoking a rich texture of feelings, emotions, and moods. Sometimes images arise vividly in our minds and spark a chain of thought; at other times we can sense our minds bringing an idea into focus. At first we may simply sense that we are seeing images or thinking thoughts, but soon thought becomes more substantial; we are aware of the actual words in our minds as we think or express them in speech or in writing. The words expressing images and thoughts are concepts, linked together in strings that clarify their relationships. Concepts are the building blocks of our language, and their meanings are the substance of our knowledge. Many concepts we use today had their origin long ago. Throughout human history, one concept has grown out of another, branching and proliferating like vines in a jungle. Concepts may be simple identifiers like ‘tree’ and ‘house’ or more abstract notions like ‘freedom’, ‘love’, or ‘justice’. They are built up through a process of distinctions, following a logical pattern that contrasts ‘this’ and ‘not-this’. ‘Green’ is distinguished from ‘not-green’; ‘tree’ is distinguished from all that is ‘not-tree’. These distinctions depend upon each other—’tall’ takes its meaning in comparison with ‘short’, ‘big’ has meaning in comparison with ‘small’. Thus concepts don’t have meaning on their own: There is no such thing as “tall” without “short”’ So “tall” cannot stand on its own. It’s relative.

People usually come to the Work feeling that they have a lot of gaps and holes it will help them fill. While the Work will not fill these gaps, it can show you that you’re trying to work on something that is not you and thinking it is, that if you see rightly, you will see that you don’t have gaps, you don’t have holes. It’s not necessarily an easy process. The mind and personality have accumulated many inaccurate beliefs, preconceptions and presuppositions. You could say that the Work is a process of education or re-education, though not in the traditional sense, since it is a shedding, rather than an accumulation. You are learning to be simple, and that simplicity is the completeness. A person who is not self-realized is a complex person. The person who knows him or herself truly is very simple; there’s nothing there to understand and no complications. It’s not as if they’re so simple that it’s easy to understand. They’re so simple that there’s nothing to understand. You just are, and that’s it. 

When we realize the happening of all that happens, we see the magic and the power of true nature and we understand the question of action and activity. This mysterious ground, this empty presence, this spacious lucidity, this fullness that is at once nothingness, is not a static presence. It’s full of energy, full of life, full of dynamism, full of throbbing, orgasmic, convulsive movements happening all the time. This dynamism and power and force are what manifest each and every form, spontaneously every instant. This simple stillness full of graceful clarity, in its depth and silence, is gently and effortlessly manifesting everything in a process of effulgence and light. The enlightened view includes the process of manifestation, includes this constant effulgence that creates all the things in the world from the void, that materializes each thing from nothing. In that sense, reality is a wizard. Out of complete nothingness appears all that we perceive and experience. And it’s as simple and as easy as dreaming something. When you dream, you create a whole universe that feels like solid matter; people get hurt and various things happen, but it’s really not taking any effort. You are completely asleep, completely resting, and it is all happening. It is the same with Quintessence; it is completely still and silent, and at the same time it is unfolding everything with effortless ease and spontaneity.

The understanding that is arising here is that ego development is part of the process of embodiment of Being. It is part of the process of Being finally learning to manifest and live in embodied existence. At birth the infant lives as Being, in a state of undifferentiation that is not linked to the body. A process then starts, of consciousness gradually cathecting the body and physical reality. This process of embodiment of Being is a process of personalization, of Being finally emerging as a person, a Human Being. This process of embodiment includes the process we have described, the personalization of Essence, in which the various essential aspects become integrated in the presence of the Personal Essence. Now we see that this process also involves embodiment of these essential aspects; for the Personal Essence is the embodiment of Being. In embodiment one is both Being and a person, a human being. One is the fullness and richness of Being, manifest as a unique person, living a human life in the world. One is both Being and the expression of the love of Being. Being is transcendent, and ultimately nondifferentiated. It is possible to see that the person is a result of Being differentiating into the various aspects, which then become integrated again in a process of embodiment, forming a new synthesis, the Personal Essence. When this process is complete then the human being has attained maturity. This maturity includes the capacity for transcendence; for the Personal Essence is in actuality a cell in the oneness of Being.

So the work of purification, the soul’s essential realization displacing the self-centered ego perspective, transforms us into a transparent face, a transparent window to objective reality. Purification is a process of evolution and growth. Purification is not an experience. Mostly, experience happens suddenly. We’re meditating and suddenly we are the Absolute, suddenly we’re full of grace, suddenly there’s love. Whereas experience is sudden, transformation is gradual. The sudden experience is valuable and necessary, but the impact of the sudden experience takes time to develop. We need a certain kind of commitment to the truth, a certain profound love of the truth, more encompassing than the dedication needed to have an experience, if we are to become transparent expressions of the truth. We have to be willing to allow our very substance, our very life, to transform, so that in time we will not only be a servant but be a slave to the truth. 

What interests us here is to see that psychotherapy is largely a process of expanding the self-image, which in our perspective means more openness and spaciousness in the mind. But since the mind is ultimately open and empty space, the process is actually the freeing of more space. The focus of psychotherapy, however, is in the modification of self-image in ways that allow the individual to function in a more tolerable and satisfying state of emotional health, a state called the normal condition. Through this process psychotherapy has helped many people suffering from emotional and mental distress. What if we go beyond this limit of trying to achieve a “normal” condition, if in fact we continue the process of working on the self-image starting with the normal person, the average healthy individual who already functions in a normal state? Working with such a person, who might be motivated to pursue such a process by an intuition of a deeper or truer state of being, we can continue bringing to consciousness elements of the self-image to be checked with “reality,” and allowing them to be modified or dissolved to encompass more “reality.” Through this process, the person’s experience of himself becomes more and more open and spacious until this openness culminates in the direct experience of the nature of the mind: space. It is a gradual process of thawing the frozen boundaries of the ego identity and liberating more and more space. The theory and techniques of psychoanalysis and the various therapies are used here not for the treatment of psychopathology, but for the understanding of the nature of the mind. 

The sensation of flow actually originates from the fact that our consciousness is continually unfolding, constantly creating its various forms. It is a ceaseless stream of unfolding. We can perceive unfolding on an even more subtle level. We may experience the opening up of all the points of the field as a process of appearing and disappearing. One form mysteriously disappears as another form appears and takes its place. There is no origin of what appears and no destination for what disappears. It is like appearing from thin air and disappearing back into it. There is a stream of these acts of appearing and disappearing, giving us the impression of flow and unfoldment. This perception involves experiencing the consciousness of the soul from the dimension of emptiness, where the forms appear from and disappear into emptiness. And since emptiness is not an object, it is neither a source nor a destination. The forms merely move from nonmanifestation to manifestation. (See chapter 20 for a fuller discussion of this experience of manifestation of perception.) 

The Diamond Approach is a process of experiential inquiry into the self, inviting the self to reveal its truth as a direct living understanding. At some point the inquiry begins to focus naturally on the self-identity structure of the self. For the majority of students, the truth that reveals itself at the beginning is the psychological truth of this ego structure, the psychodynamic processes that express and sustain it, and the personal history that went into its development. This confronts the student with awareness of the environmental factors that caused her narcissism, leading to the challenge and dissolution of the many levels of defense and rigidity in this structure. The inquiry proceeds further into the fundamental factors causing her narcissism. For a long time, she finds the environmental and fundamental factors linked together in a complex, but ultimately comprehensible, manner. 

I have been aware that this process involves two intertwining threads—the first a process of finishing and ripening, and the second the contemplation of death. The finishing ends in a certain kind of death, which in turn ushers consciousness into a life of ripening and contentment. I recognize that all need or movement towards a goal, even towards creativity, is ambition, which is based on ego activity. Creativity can be spontaneous unfoldment, but when it is, it happens on its own. I do not need to move towards it, want it, or concern myself with it. As the absolute, all that appears to awareness is my creativity, without my lifting a finger. I am the source of all that arises. The recognition of being devoid of ambition deepens the peace and settling of everyday consciousness. This settling becomes a feeling of contentment. The soul, the individual consciousness, begins to feel like a blobby pearl, soft and pliant, relaxed and settled. It is like being a liquid pearl, suffused with the stillness of peace, and empty of reaction or drive toward activity. Sometimes this feels like being a relaxed old man.

Beyond ambition, beyond attainment, is home.

Contentment, without content; peace, uncaused.

The peace and contentment develop into a sense of fulfillment, as the consciousness attains a nectary fluidity, with the sweetness and aroma of apricot nectar. I feel a sense of maturation, not in terms of capacity, but in the sense of ripening. The fulfilled consciousness becomes a ripening when I experience the soul not only pliant and nectary, but full and sweet, just like a very ripe apricot. The whole soul becomes a heart, a heart full of the most flavorful apricot nectar. 

What matters here for our discussion is that the sense of entity and identity (self-boundaries) is established gradually in the first three years of life, and that it is a process of fusion of many separate self-images into a total overall self-image. This self-image is not the external image that most people think of as “self-image”; it is more of an inner, comprehensive, mostly unconscious image of oneself, of which the external image (basically the social facade) is just a part. Thus the entire world-view of a person, the structure of his world, so to speak, consists of this overall self-image plus the total constellation of object images, in relation to each other. 

This clarity is central for both inquiry and understanding because they both involve the process of gradual clarification. In some sense, what is happening is that our truth is clarifying the soul’s manifestations little by little as it approaches the surface, which is our conscious experience. Its light penetrates our consciousness more and more until we recognize the source of the light. Inquiry is the invitation for our Being to reveal its truth, and this revelation is the understanding. Inquiry invites understanding by engaging the Diamond Guidance, whose operation is a process of clarifying. It is nothing but the intelligent operation of the Clarity of our nature, the intelligent functioning of the luminosity of our true nature. In the process of inquiry, we become more and more objective as well as more present, more real, more authentic, and more loving and compassionate, for our true nature is all of these qualities. Clarity, which is luminous transparency, is the heart of objectivity, the essence of objectivity. It is also the essence and the core of the Diamond Guidance. The clear, transparent presence is the fabric of the Guidance, the very substance of it. The guidance is fundamentally a clarity that assumes various colors. It is a transparency that luminates with various qualities, while its central nature is revelation and guidance.

Separation anxiety is one of the main reasons the Strength Essence is blocked or repressed. There is a cul-de-sac that frequently occurs in relation to separation. One resists separation, due to anxiety or other causes, and thus blocks the Strength Essence. One then feels weak, and unable to separate. This weakness is then taken as the reason behind not being able to be separate, while in fact it is the result of resisting separation. It is really the state of the absence of the Strength Essence, and hence it is the state of lack of separation. This difficulty can be surmounted by confronting the weakness itself. This will then expose the anxiety that led to the weakness. Understanding the source of the anxiety then precipitates the experience of the Strength Essence, as we saw in the case of Hank, above. We will not go into further detail about this aspect of Essence. We are doing a short discussion here only to show its relation to the process of separation, and hence to the process of realization of the Personal Essence. It is, however, an aspect of Essence, on its own. It has its own issues, questions and conflicts that need to be resolved for its realization. It has its own detailed perspective of the process of development. This development can be seen, in fact, from beginning to end, as a process of gradual separation and expansion, with separation taking subtler meanings as the process progresses.

The development of ego and sense of personal identity depends, as we have seen, on the process of identification, culminating in the formation of a self-image. We have seen that the formation of self-representations is a process of freezing boundaries in the emptiness of the mind. In contrast, the pearl beyond price, the personal aspect of essence, is a sense of personal identity that does not depend on self-representation, and hence, does not depend on the existence or the defending of boundaries in open space. In fact, its development comes about through the undoing of these identifications. The culmination of the elimination of identifications is the birth of the pearl beyond price, or the discovery of one’s own essential person-hood, one’s personal nature that does not depend on the past. This is an aspect of Being that is not understood or appreciated until it is experienced. When it manifests, one cannot but be filled with wonder at the majesty, beauty, and richness of essence. 

The relation of our concept of absorption to the experience of Being must now be explored. Our hypothesis is still somewhat vague. To make it more definite, we turn now to our basis for this suggestion, which arises out of certain experiences in the process of inner transformation that show the relationship between ego structures and Being. The process of essential realization itself can be seen as a process of “metabolizing” identification systems. Every time a system of identifications, a self-image or an object relation, is understood objectively, it seems to dissolve and an aspect of Essence is born. We will explore this further as we discuss understanding in the next chapter. 

We sometimes view our path as including two major journeys—ascent and descent—a journey toward enlightenment and a journey toward becoming a complete human being. The journey of ascent is a matter of realizing one dimension after another, all the way to the absolute dimension. We recognize and experience that dimension as the nature of reality in its vastness and mystery and clarity, as the ground of everything. Then the journey of descent is a process of integrating all the dimensions and qualities and vehicles into that absolute reality. The path of descent is actually a matter of integrating our lives into our realization. So the view of totality includes the views of all the aspects, all the vehicles, and all the dimensions of reality. It also includes the views of many other paths and teachings, and is open in such a way as to include whatever path we might encounter and from which we might learn. But it is not simply a synthetic hodgepodge of all these views into one state or one view. The view of totality holds, without losing or blending, many particularized views. I use the word “totality” because this is a view that encompasses many different perspectives, as different perspectives, at the same time. 

In the second journey, essence continues to unfold in its various aspects and dimensions. This is where most of the essential development of the soul occurs, as a process of her integrating the arising essence, which is the same as essence impacting her. The process of essential development takes the soul from her initial condition at the completion of ego development, in which she is dissociated from her true nature and living mostly as the animal soul with a civilized veneer of ego structures, to the station of the human soul. In other words, the discovery and integration of essence transforms the soul from its condition of being primarily an animal soul to the state of being primarily a human soul, a soul with heart. What transforms the animal soul to the human soul is her becoming receptive and transparent to essence. When essence manifests through the attitudes and actions of the soul we recognize that she now behaves in a more human way, with heart. This is primarily the task of the second journey of presence, the journey with presence. The soul journeys here in the company of presence, receptive to it and guided by it. 

Of course, it also means that we need to consider the life we live and how we are living it. What takes us away from just being where we are? What do we value instead of valuing the truth of the moment? Where does our attention go? How much of our resources of time and energy are actually needed for taking care of the necessities of daily life? What do we lose by turning away from where we are now? Exploring these questions becomes a process of integrating presence into the rest of our life. So, our practice is a process of settling deeper into the moment and learning more about what takes us away from it. The mirror of our awareness gradually becomes less obscured and more luminous as it reveals to us the preciousness of what we truly are. The capacity of this teaching to transform your own life can extend out to affect your environment, changing the way that you relate to other people and the world at large. As you come to appreciate and value True Nature and know it for the mysterious and limitless source of life that it is, it impacts and transforms your own manifestation as a person. True Nature can express itself through you more directly, touching others and opening up the richness and possibility of what it means to be human. That is one way that the flame is passed on, that the light is spread. In my experience, this is the most effective way to support a deeper change in the condition of consciousness in our world.

We need an understanding that includes a process of integration of functioning that is not contrary to the nature of experience of Being. This understanding is made possible by certain experiences and perceptions encountered in the process of the inner realization of Being, which can be stated in the form of an hypothesis that explains how it is possible to learn new skills and functions without needing ego structures. The hypothesis is that one can absorb a skill so well that all memory, conscious and unconscious, becomes unnecessary. It becomes, so to speak, part of one’s being. The body and mind can become so adapted to the skill, that it resembles instinctual capacity. Our suggestion is that this capacity of integration and learning must be included as one of the apparatuses of primary autonomy, that it is an inborn human capacity. The implication is that this capacity, although it needs ego development to begin functioning under normal circumstances, is already part of the potential of the human organism and is not the product of ego development. So our hypothesis is that there is a certain human capacity, one of the apparatuses of primary autonomy, that we will call “absorption,” and define as follows: Absorption is the innate ability of the human organism to completely assimilate learning from experience, to absorb it to the degree of not needing the memory of the learning process, either consciously or unconsciously.

Integrated means your life flows according to your understanding. If you have some experience of reality but you don’t live according to that perception, that means that perception has not been integrated. Integrated means it is naturally, implicitly there, in what you do, how you think, how you operate. You notice the first experiences in learning. During the first steps you have certain experiences and you realize, “This is real, I know what love is now,” for instance. Then the next day you act as if love was not that. That means that the experience of love is not integrated yet. There has to be a process of integration: When it is integrated you not only know love, but you are wise about love. Then you act with maturity and love with maturity. Maturity is not an absolute term. It depends on what understanding has been integrated, so there is no end to it. 

Even though your struggle seems very painful and difficult at times, it has its usefulness. It is an integral aspect of working on yourself. The struggle is, in a sense, a process of internal combustion. You could, of course, be a stupid saint or a happy vegetable if that’s all you want. But then you would miss out on being a genuine adult, a mature human being. I’m not here to take away the problems and give you something yummy. I’m not here to save you from your problems. I’m here to show you how to struggle with your problems and resolve your issues. I’m here to show you how to make wine, how to grow the grapes and take care of them, how to press them, how to work with them until they turn into wine. You need to learn how to make wine for yourself. If I do it for you, you’ll have to keep buying wine. But if you use me in a way to learn how to make the wine yourself, then you will become an adult, which is what this Work is really about—becoming mature human beings who do not need or even want to be fed or watered by someone else.