The way to actualize the truth is to love it, which then becomes a process of learning and education. You discover then what you take yourself to be and why. You take yourself to be who you think you are because of the truth that you have forgotten. Your emotions, feelings, beliefs, patterns, and conflicts determine your experience and perception. You need to delve deeply into them and investigate them in order to discover what objectively exists. You can’t see the truth objectively as long as your mind is influenced by these things that have become part of the unconscious of your personality. Your fear, anger, hurt, hatred, vulnerability, and doubt all need to surface. Inquiring into these elements of your mind allows you to discover your unconscious beliefs about reality, enlightenment, God, yourself. What you believe is supposed to happen and what your dreams and hopes are need to emerge into the light of awareness and understanding in order for you to examine their truth. This is not easy to do. No one experience that you are going to have will get rid of all of these beliefs. No single experience of enlightenment will dissolve your unconscious. You will have to deal with and come to terms with the specific forms and content of your mind.

Let’s look more closely at the process we’re engaged in here. We’re saying that this Work is basically a process of learning to grow up. It is not a matter of getting better or becoming a more perfect person. It is a matter of growing up, with all that growing up requires. A neurotic human being is a childish human being. A psychotic human being is an infantile human being. A healthy human being is an adult. 

The course of the work is a learning process. It has been described in many ways: enlightenment, freedom, liberation, realization, union. There are countless ways to go about doing the work: through the will, the heart, the mind. But, ultimately, it is a matter of learning, of growing up. The simplest way to describe this is as a process of learning to mature. The inner journey is a matter of each of us coming into our own. What does it mean to come into our own? From the beginning, we must allow that we don’t know what it means. We are not necessarily going to be bigger or better persons than we are now. Growing up might be a completely different thing. A child cannot grasp what it is to be an adult until adulthood arrives. Even if the child witnesses adulthood all the time, which is what usually happens, it does not mean there will be understanding. Understanding and real knowing of what adulthood is will have to wait for adulthood. What we usually consider adulthood is not real adulthood; it is a case of arrested development. It is not easy to mature on our own. Our difficulty with maturation stems basically from two kinds of ignorance: what we have forgotten and what we don’t yet know. Inner work is a process of remembering what we have forgotten and learning what we still don’t know. We can’t do one without the other. If we only remember what we have forgotten, it won’t be enough. If we simply learn what we don’t know, it’s not enough. There has to be an interaction between the two.

Initially, an inquiry will often begin with reflecting on a past experience. You have reactions, concerns, residual feelings, or just a curiosity about what you have experienced. A feeling in the moment may be what triggers the inquiry, but exploring that feeling will often take you back to the situation that provoked the feeling. The inquiry then becomes a process of looking to see what the truth is about what happened. Much can be understood if you stay open and curious about discovering the truth for yourself. If you continue to be aware of yourself as you inquire into the past, at some point your focus will naturally tend to shift to an interest in the truth of your present experience. Then the inquiry becomes more immediate and alive because you are now opening to what is happening in the moment. This movement back and forth between past and present is an ongoing dynamic that is natural in inquiry. However, the more you are attuned to your immediate experience, whether you are inquiring about the past or the present, the more you will be open to the possibility of realizing your own deeper truth. Inquiry is a spiritual practice, and like any other, it develops over time. 

So the Beloved is not only inside, it is the fabric of who we are. Not only is it inside, but we always love it. We never stop loving it. We can’t help it. We cannot not love the Beloved, because the very process of maturation is nothing but the movement according to that love. It is a love that we don't need to create; it is the love already there behind the veils. We are made in such a way that our very maturation is based on our love for ourselves. So I don't believe, as many psychologists do, that you learn to internalize taking care of yourself and loving ourself because your parents loved you. That's not the case. We already loved ourselves. Our life itself is a process of loving.  The deeper we go into ourselves, the more veils we go through, which means the more accurately we see and know the Beloved. Recognizing the sources of our veils is one of the ways of rending them. We need to recognize our love for the Beloved by recognizing our love for ourselves—but we have to start by seeing that we really believe that we are unlovable. We learn in some way at some point that we are unlovable. But that is ridiculous! How can a human being be unlovable? Still, we end up believing that we are unlovable, and that is why we don't love ourselves—and we believe that this is why other people don't love us. That's not it. Can't be. That is not part of the laws of nature. 

Lest we think morphogenic transformation is a process in time, we need to remember that it is actually a process of manifestation out of nonmanifestation. We experience it as a transforming field, but the transformation is basically a continual appearing, a magical display of potential into actuality.

We can also experience universal transformation as a process of manifestation. In this perception we are aware of the purity of true nature, a homogeneous unity beyond any form or color. We perceive the forms of the universe manifesting out of this timeless ground, as if they are first hidden and unmanifest but then come out into manifestation. We then view the appearance of Being as the manifest reality, with the pure ground of Being as the unmanifest. This perception is clearest when we perceive the transformation process from the perspective of the absolute dimension, the subject of the next chapter. There are many grades of subtlety to this perception, which we will discuss in the next chapter. We experience the absolute as the unmanifest, the source of all manifestation, and perceive everything manifesting out of it. In fact, we witness the whole dimension of dynamic presence as manifesting within the vast mystery of the absolute, which is concomitant to the continual manifesting of the totality of the universe. More accurately, we experience the dimension of dynamic presence as the manifesting manifestation. Its emergence is the emergence of all creation, with all of its dimensions and forms. 

Living Being is growing organs, ripening them, using one organ to develop another, and probably using several organs and many situations to develop any particular organ. So when we understand this, we recognize that as individuals, we are merely one source of help, one part of a process of maturation of any particular organ. It is always Living Being helping itself. Or we could say that Living Being, through its dynamism and intelligence, is ripening a particular organ. And part of this ripening is a manifestation through other organs of a particular functioning or activity or communication that, from our individual perspective, we might think of as one person helping another. We can see from our discussion that when we think of helping somebody else, there is in it a hint of self, a hint of self-centeredness, even though we might be realized. The self can resurface in subtle ways as long as we haven’t seen the implications of realization. One of the implications of the realized and enlightened condition is that nobody helps anybody.

Because there are many and various potentials in the human being, there are naturally wide variations in the perception of how the process of maturation proceeds. Different teachings emphasize different parts of the human potential. There are also differences in the value attached to the various potentials, and in the ways these potentials are conceptualized. Two major views of how the process proceeds stand out:

(a) The progressive or sudden abandonment of ego identifications to the point of realizing the nonpersonal aspects of Being. The work or practice is centered around ego and not Being. The attitudes emphasized are those of impersonality, detachment and objectivity. There follows a process of realizing the personal aspects, seen some times as the process of bringing Being into the world. The most representative tradition of this perspective is Buddhism. In legends and fairy tales, this perspective is reflected by the seeking stories where the hero must go to an invisible land to find the object of his seeking, and bring it back to his original homeland, with peace and prosperity.

(b) The gradual and progressive realization of the differentiated aspects of Being, the essential aspects, by the working through of segments of ego identifications. The emphasis is on developing the Personal Essence. The work or practice is centered more around Essence, and is less focused on ego. The attitudes emphasized are those of loving the truth and serving God. This process is seen to continue till the entry into the nonpersonal realms.

Our work of inquiry can be understood as a process of metabolizing experience—past and present experience. By being fully present in your experience you metabolize it and grow. When it comes to the past, our Work can be seen as understanding or metabolizing your unconscious mind, your ego, or personality. True metabolism doesn’t lead to deficiency or weakness, but to development, growth, and the functioning capacity of Being. Without experience Being cannot be in the world. Metabolism leads to the capacity to be in the world, and that is what it means to have a human life. However, if we fail to metabolize our experience—for example, by rejecting it and thus stopping the metabolic process—we retain undigested experience, which in time will become suffering. Because of the unmetabolized food in your mind, which is the influence of the past, your capacity to directly contact your experience in the present is severely reduced, so you cannot eat properly. There is already food in your system that has been rotting for years. First, you need to metabolize what is inside you to some degree, in order to have a greater capacity to metabolize your present experience. This has two results for our Work: One is the cleaning out of the past, and the other is that the more you have done that, the more capacity you have in the present. This allows events in the present to transform you. If you are really present and in present time, any impression or experience will lead to metamorphosis and maturity.

The soul is noy only a conscious presence; it is an unfolding dynamic organism of consciousness. She is pure potentiality, a potentiality that is inherently dynamic, whose dynamism unfolds the elements of her infinite potential through a process of morphing manifestation. The unfoldment of the soul produces not only constant change and transformation, but also movement toward a greater actualization of potential. The more potential manifests, the wider and the deeper is our experience, and the more expanded our sense of who we are and what we can do. A seed not only generates other seeds, or other kinds of seeds; it opens up and develops into a tree. The morphogenic transformation is not only a generation of forms, but also a generation of ever-expanding forms, forms of increasing complexity and organization. The mind expands not only in terms of the different functions it can exercise, but also in the development of these functions to greater and greater complexity and performance. Our emotional life develops and matures in intensity, depth, range, level, and kind. The way we experience ourselves evolves in an ever-increasing complexity and richness.

The significant point for us here is the recognition that the soul manifests her inner potential through a process of morphogenic transformation. She does not throw things out of herself into some kind of space outside. She does not dismember herself and then mold each part into some form. Experiences do not fall into her, do not enter her from somewhere else. The elements of her potential arise by her morphing her substance, her conscious presence, into these forms. 

Ego inadequacy is one of the issues that we call “diamond issues” in the Diamond Approach. It is a universal issue, which is not due to specific personal history but is a consequence of the nature of ego. A diamond issue is an ego issue that results from identification with ego. Its presence is inseparable from ego identifications, regardless of how pathological or healthy the ego structure is. Only the severity of the issue is determined by the particular personal history. Guntrip has a deep and detailed understanding of the issue of ego inadequacy, but he does not go all the way to seeing it as an issue for all egos. Since it is a process of moving from ego to Being, the process of inner realization deals largely with diamond issues. All the major emotional issues and conflicts we have discussed in this book are diamond issues. They are characteristic of ego structure, and do not necessarily reflect mental pathology. Of course, there are individual variations in the way an issue manifests, which reflect personal history, but the basic pattern and resolution are universal. So our discussion in this book of the various issues applies to everyone. Every individual has them as part of his ego structure, unless he is not identified with ego. 

Inquiry is a process of nuzzling into God’s bosom, delving into the secrets of existence. Ego encrustations begin to break up when we start to see images as images, structures as structures, patterns as patterns, and projections as projections. All of these are created and held together by our belief that they are reality. The more you see them as they truly are, the less you believe in them and the more they start to break up and dissolve. 

As we see, whichever way we look into the nature of inquiry, we find that it has to be open. When you inquire into something, you are opening it up, you are revealing it. Ordinary experience comes in a wrapping. To inquire, you open the wrapping, you remove the veils that obscure it to see what is there. So the very nature of inquiry is a process of opening up; and what you open up are boundaries, limits, positions, beliefs—any stand you may be taking about what you are experiencing. In other words, we can say that inquiry is a process of always opening and opening and opening, endlessly and freely. And it opens from any place, from any direction, from any level, from any position. If you really want to go into your adventure with no limitations on how far and how fast you can go, openness has to be total and absolute. The moment you limit the openness, you have limited the amount of energy available for the journey. So the process has to be open ended in every way: in terms of how you go about it, what you inquire into, and where the journey takes you. Every limitation has to be challenged, or at least you have to be willing to challenge it. It is obvious how thrilling inquiry can be if you have the attitude that anything can be challenged. You can take the most mundane experience and open it up. It does not have to be anything special for you to inquire into it. Everything becomes new, disclosing itself in a new light. This opening has a sense of newness, of freshness, of revelation, like a baby just coming into the world. Everything you encounter is seen as if for the first time. 

Every situation or interaction between infant and mother is an object relation. Except in the very earliest phases, in which there is no differentiation at all, the infant always sees himself in relation to the mother, not in isolation. The memories of such interactions are mental representations of the object relations. The infant remembers not only himself (that is the image of himself) but always also the image of the mother in the interaction. The fixation of these representations in the mind is called “internalization.” As more of these representations accumulate, which means as more memories are retained and fixed, there begins a process of organization of these representations. This organization of internalized object relations is the task of the separation-individuation process, which ordinarily culminates in the development of self and object constancy.

Thus the realization of the Personal Essence can be understood to be the way that Being learns to be in the world. The Personal Essence is the aspect of Being that embodies the wisdom of the world. We have discussed the Personal Essence as the aspect of Being connected with functioning. We have seen it as an integration of the functions of primary autonomy, on the Being level. So the development of the Personal Essence is the way Being becomes functional in the world. We can see now in what way ego development is part of a larger process, a process by which Being becomes a human being. This process, which includes cathecting physical reality, is that of the realization of the Personal Essence. So it is a process of personalization of Being.

You see, our nature is positionless. Or, more accurately, reality always presents itself in positions—especially when we speak about it—but these positions are never fixed or rigid. Being’s dynamism is a process of positioning, but it’s a positioning that’s always fluid, always changing from one position to another. Being cannot be pinned down in one position. We can take these positions as pointers, but not as a frame into which to fit our experience. Being is not an image to fulfill and not a goal to try to attain by pushing our experience in that direction. When you are inquiring, you want to be totally open to what is present without any preconceptions, without any preset ideas, without any particular orientation. So you cannot take a position that I may have enunciated at one time or another—or that you got from some teacher or teaching, or even from your own previous experience—adhere to it rigidly, and expect your inquiry to be free and open ended. Your inquiry will be predetermined, set in a particular direction. It will not be free. And it will very likely distort what is going on or obscure the clear perception of what’s truly arising in your experience.

Of course, when you let yourself be, as you let yourself sink into reality, you might experience unpleasant things; but these are simply the barriers that stop you from being. In time, with presence, they will dissolve. You might experience discomfort, fear, hurt, various negative feelings. These are the things that you’re trying to avoid by not being here. But they are just accumulations of what has been swept under the rug of unconsciousness; they are not you. They are what you confront on the way to beingness. When we acknowledge and understand these feelings while being present, they dissolve, because the idea of ourselves that they are based on is not real. When the illusions dissolve, what is real, your nature, will surface and remain. You go through a process of purification, not because Being itself is sullied, but because you have so many accumulated assumptions and beliefs about reality. If you continue to hope, and tell yourself stories, you will remain asleep, because reality is still the way it is whether you like it or not. The mirage hasn’t worked for you yet and it will not work with more persistence. Would you want it any other way? Would you want your happiness to depend on something other than your nature? 

In the process of inquiry and understanding, the soul first throws away her old garb—all our accumulated images, patterns, and self-concepts. This is a process of purification, part of the overall process of revelation in which inquiry reveals the hidden potentials in our soul. At some point, the purified soul—the soul that has gone through the process of clarification—becomes transparent awareness. What we call true nature becomes the soul’s identity. Self-realization and awareness coincide as a coemergence of soul and identity. Our experience continues as an unfoldment in which the identity stays the same and only the content that presents itself to our awareness changes. 

In the process of realization of pure Being, the alternation is not between the personality and presence, but rather, between duality and unity. In duality, the student experiences herself as the totality of the ego-self, the personality, separate from the presence and resistant to it. She also experiences and understands it by being it. She experiences the movement of her ego-self directly, in all its details. She experiences it from within, in its totality, with a specific understanding of the nature of its functioning. This is in contrast to the experience of the personality in the dimension of the Essential Identity, where she experiences it from the outside, as the other who is struggling and suffering. In the dimension of pure Being, her understanding of the nature of suffering becomes more specific and complete. The result is that the personality is not necessarily transformed in the self-realization of the Essential Identity; there is only the shift of its identity. The complete realization of pure Being involves a process of purification and clarification of the personality, until there is no difference between it and the purity of Being. The final outcome is the condition of unity in which we experience the personality (the ego-self) as an inseparable manifestation of pure Being. 

The primary practice at this stage is the inquiry that integrates the understanding of the dynamism of realization, the understanding of the fulcrum of the path—how our practicing is true nature revealing itself, how our inquiry is Living Being living its realization. Integrating this understanding can become a powerful wisdom that gives our practice—which is now a way of being, a way of living—the freedom and richness and potency to reveal realization upon realization. We come to see practice as a process of realization realizing realization. This ongoing inquiry carries through our formal practices as well as our everyday life. As we are living our life, the dynamic revelation of diamond samadhi continues. We live our realization by living a life that naturally includes and expresses the dynamism of Living Being, as a curiosity and an interest and an inclination that simply reveals further realization. We are naturally drawn to see through whatever ignorance, identifications, and limitations remain in the way of our understanding reality, including seeing our various attachments to realization.

One of the difficulties that can arise in our experience—not only in this teaching but in inner work in general—is the tendency to objectify true nature, the tendency to make it into a something. As we have encounters with true nature, whether we come into contact with it or we are it, true nature can appear as something different from other things, as a distinct particular. Its particularity and its difference give rise to the possibility of setting it apart; and by setting it apart, we objectify it, which begins a process of reification that feeds our sense of being an isolated self. As we objectify true nature, we both misconstrue it and support a sense of self that is disconnected from it. This tends to solidify the shell of the self, which means that we don’t recognize that true nature is  what we are. 

More accurately, the ordinary concepts of change and movement are based on reified concepts of objects and phenomena, the products of a process of reification that dissociates us from the direct experience of our ground true nature. The reification is exposed when we recognize how change occurs from the vantage point of true nature, as on the dimension of dynamic presence. We begin to see the reality of change, which reveals that there is no such thing as movement. Change entails a transformation of appearance over the entire field of presence, similar to cinema frames changing; however, it is a continuous change, not a series of discrete changes as in the case of an actual cinema film. By revealing the nature of change the dimension of dynamic presence also discloses the true meaning and sources of development, growth, evolution, and all processes and phenomena that have a continuity in time. Before we discuss these we need first to explore in some detail the experience of change in the dimension of dynamic being. We experience this universal transformation in various ways, according to the subtlety of our realization; these have been reflected by the various wisdom teachings of humankind. 

We are not glorifying ancient times, nor condemning our post-industrial era. We are aware that in ancient times only a few individuals contemplated the fundamental questions of existence, while the majority languished not only in material backwardness and depravity, but also in moral darkness and psychological ignorance. In contrast, our modern world has brought not only increased material comfort and great advances in medicine and health, but also greater opportunity for education and increased awareness of human values and rights. The isolating separation of the basic triad has obviously been a double-edged sword. It has led to increased discrimination and specialization, benefiting humanity in completely novel ways, while at the same time blinding us to the ground of true nature through a process of reification. We discussed in chapter 4 how normal and logical knowledge differentiated all the way to dissociation from its ground of pure presence, a dissociation that resulted in the forgetfulness of the Greek’s notion of nous, direct and basic knowing, where knowing and presence are inseparable. This mechanism has been the primary way that Western thought dissociated the three facets of the triadic unity. For by dissociating knowledge from its ground of Being, both world and soul lose this ground of essential presence; and without this ground we can only see them dissociated from each other and from the concerns of religion and spirituality, while the latter then attempt to exclusively focus on the ground.

When we recognize that true nature is not a self-existing object and cannot be reified, we may face the pitfall of believing that we can actually stop or avoid reification by using our mind. This is yet another delusion because the mind, for the most part, cannot function without reifying. The ordinary mind is itself a process of reifying and using reification to think. Even though it has the potential to work differently, it develops through a process of objectification and reification from the moment we start learning. From childhood, our thinking develops by apprehending objects and the relationships between objects. This is a built-in mechanism of the mind. Our neural networks are completely set this way. We can’t try to not reify, because it is impossible to stop reifying using the ordinary mind. And the effort to stop reifying is also a misunderstanding of how awakening and illumination happen, how the diffusion of reification happens. The ordinary mind doesn’t have enough luminosity to even notice reification, let alone try to avoid it. Without the illuminating power of true nature, the ordinary mind faced with reification will just spin its wheels, which is what it’s good at. 

We are seeing that the entire journey of inquiry is a process of revealing truth that cannot be separated from the integration of that truth in our lives. If we truly commit ourselves to contacting the dynamism of Being, it will not only bring insight and realization, it will also bring change and transformation in our life as well as in our soul. 

We are interested in discovering how to live life in a way that is more human, more humane. We are seeking more value, more depth, more refinement in our lives, and this means becoming more human. It is in the very nature of human beings to be loving and gentle, and to have the capacity to enjoy and appreciate. So this Work is really a matter of uncovering or revealing these parts of us: our human capacities. These are not capacities you are going to be given or that you are just going to get. They are part of you. The Work is a process of revealing your human nature to yourself, so you can live increasingly in accordance with your essential nature. As you understand and realize the essential human values, your life will come to have a different meaning, as will your work, your relationships, and your family. You will be living your life, then, from a perspective completely different from the conventional one, although the external appearance of your life might be the same. The task is to live an ordinary life and be truly human at the same time.