Obviously, understanding requires an intimate awareness of experience. It requires intimate contact with your own consciousness—a deep awareness of your thoughts, feelings, sensations, and actions, of all the colors and impressions that arise in your experience. All these must be present in your awareness, not vaguely but in a very clear, crisp way. When our awareness is crisp, we call it diamond-like, for it is very precise, clear discrimination. Red is red, blue is blue, pressure is pressure, and lightness is lightness. When the pattern is precise and clear, it automatically reveals its meaning: “This red is not only red but feels strong; it makes me feel strong,” and “I’m feeling strong in my upper body, but down here in my pelvis, I am feeling weak.” That awareness may lead you to understand why you feel strength in one part of your body and weakness in another part and how that affects our experience of yourself. Reasoning can be part of this process. It is a faculty used by understanding, by the Diamond Guidance. The Guidance uses reasoning in the usual way: You see dichotomies, positions, and similarities, and you can relate what is similar and what is dissimilar; you can synthesize and analyze. But you do these things within the experience, not only in your mind. The mental faculty, the reasoning faculty, is subsumed in the totality of the experience; it is used as one element within it. Reason helps your discrimination by making it even sharper. So reasoning, and the mental operations in general, make use of your previous experience, your ordinary knowledge. When used intelligently, your experience of your life—your conventional wisdom—can be useful in understanding your present experience. We can summarize by saying that understanding involves three elements: a full in-touchness with the fabric of experience, the precise discrimination of the various patterns of this fabric, and the insightful comprehension of the meaning and significance of these patterns and their interrelationships.

As we have seen, inquiry uses many faculties, capacities, and skills. It uses mindfulness and concentration. It uses reasoning and intuition. It uses analysis and synthesis. It uses observation and knowledge. It uses energy and intelligence. All of these we will explore in more depth as we go along. But inquiry’s central tool is a question. Here we have been exploring four factors in asking a question: first, the unknowingness, which expresses the dynamic openness; second, direct observation of our immediate experience; third, ordinary knowledge bringing relevant information from the past; and fourth, the organic, self-responsive intelligence. We can say that inquiry is mindfulness with a dynamism that is open to seeing what it does not know, plus concentration with an energy that loves to find out the truth that it does not know. Concentration is necessary for staying on track and not getting distracted by stimuli that aren’t relevant to the particular inquiry. Mindfulness provides the capacity to be aware of anything that emerges in experience, regardless of how minute or subtle. The global awareness of mindfulness reveals the patterns of unknowing in experience. And questioning directs consciousness to investigate the not-knowing. Inquiry, based on love and dynamic openness, is a journey of wonderment whose center is a question that embodies knowing and unknowing. That dynamic openness makes all our questions penetrating and encompassing, which activates the optimizing force of Being—in the form of the Diamond Guidance—so that it may reveal the hidden truth, the truth beyond the known. What is needed now is love of the truth for its own sake to give that questioning power and urgency, enough to carry our spacecruiser out of our earthbound orbit and into the depths of the mystery.

The difference between Holy Faith and Holy Hope is that faith is a trust in the fact of the presence of Being, while hope is trust in the creative flow of the functioning of that presence. So faith gives you the sense of being supported and taken care of by the universe, while hope gives you the sense that as things unfold, everything is and will be fine. Holy Hope, then, is an openness, a curiosity, a receptivity, and an optimism about how things are going to reveal themselves, because you are certain that the optimizing thrust of reality moves toward harmony and fulfillment. Even putting it in this way makes the hope sound too specific—it is just an open optimism about life. It is obvious how this kind of hope is helpful and necessary on the path, since it is needed to allow the unfoldment of the soul to progress without feeling the need to interfere with it or direct it. We know that it is inherently guided, and this knowing is not an idea in our minds, nor the result of reasoning, nor a logical certainty. It is an experiential transformation of the soul that makes the soul progressively more open and happily optimistic, trusting that everything will transpire in the best way, beyond our preconceived ideas of what we think is best. It is not a hope for something specific, as we have said. If it were, it would be egoic hope based on judgments and preconceptions about what we think ought to happen, and on rejection of the present. It is, rather, the growing and deepening certainty that whatever happens will be part of the optimizing thrust of reality and its guidance. It is complete openness to the unfoldment.

When the soul arrives at her absolute home, recognizes her true beloved, and realizes it as her ipseity, many insights, realizations, and feelings spontaneously arise. One’s life begins to show its overall pattern, seen from the perspective of the inner journey home. This culminates in the personalization of the absolute ipseity, where we learn to be a human being, a person, and to still abide in the absolute. This is an unusual and rarely known realization, where the vastness of the mystery, without ceasing to be the mystery, finds itself walking with two legs, touching with human hands, speaking with a mouth, and so on. (For the details of this process of personalization, see The Pearl Beyond Price, chapter 38.) At this point the soul is surprised by new feelings and realizations that occur spontaneously, as if brought home by the power of the self-realization. What spontaneously arises, without self-reflection or reasoning, is the feeling that the soul is at the end of a certain phase of life and work. She feels she has accomplished the task she had set for herself, or is in the last stages of finishing it. She recognizes her worldly accomplishments and her realization of her true nature. But the feeling is more general than the specific accomplishments. It is a sense of finishing something. There is a feeling of space or room left, open for new possibilities.

Our understanding of the essential aspects reveals that they are the elements of the authentic experience of being simply and freely ourselves. They are the richness of the free and creative unfoldment of the human potential of our soul. Their presence indicates a measure of freedom in our experience and a degree of openness to the mysteries of our Being. The essential aspects also form the true and authentic ground for all of our subtle capacities. Sometimes termed the higher faculties, these are the soul’s deeper-than-ordinary capacities for perceiving, experiencing, and inner functioning. The presence of each aspect imbues the soul with a certain property of consciousness that opens it up and develops its potential, providing it with a specific subtle capacity or faculty of functioning. For example, the aspect of Truth, which we will look at fully in chapter 23, possesses a specific affect discernible as truth. It provides the soul with the capacity to directly differentiate truth from falsehood. Without this capacity, inquiry would not be possible as a path of understanding. In other words, the experience and realization of the aspect of Truth activates in the soul a certain faculty that makes it possible for her to recognize truth without having to resort to reasoning or logic. Over time, this becomes the ability to recognize truth directly and with certainty. One is confident that the capacity to discern truth is functioning because one is aware of the presence of the essential aspect of Truth, which is recognized by, among other things, its clearly discernible affective tone. It feels real, dense, warm, and smooth, but above all, has a preciousness that makes it feel very close to our heart, as if it were the depth of the heart itself.

There is a deeper form of intuition that is the function of a certain aspect of essence. We referred to this aspect earlier as objective consciousness or the diamond body. We also called it the body of knowledge. This aspect has the capacity to take facts and data, all of the different kinds of understanding about a particular object or situation, and consider them all together, simultaneously and instantly. The reasoning mind is linear; it cannot consider too many facts at the same time to find a solution. It is limited in its capacity to hold information simultaneously. This is why computers are so valuable. They can consider a whole array of facts, all at the same time. This aspect of essence can do just that, not in a thought form but in a more lived and felt way. Its capacity for considering many facts and many dimensions is limitless. Everything in the situation is considered, and the result is a certain perception that integrates all the facts, on the various levels of understanding. If this part of us is unconscious, then we will experience its perception as an intuition. If it comes in a flash, we think of it as an insight. If this aspect of essence is present in our consciousness, we experience the perception as a direct knowing. This is real intuition. A person who is this essence does not need to use the linear mind and rack his brain over certain important situations. The direct knowledge is just there, available. There is usually a certainty with it, a clarity and precision, and also an aliveness that is very delicate and exquisite. This delicacy, this exquisite presence is missed when the person is satisfied with insights and intuitions and does not use them to guide himself to their source, which is essence.

The presence of soul is not available to our awareness in normal experience; normal experience is that of the soul that has collapsed into a self, through the process of dissociating from the ground of its Being, which is presence. To be aware of our soul as presence is to be presence. To be presence is to be aware of our beingness. To be aware of our beingness is to simply be. In this state our knowing of ourselves is direct, independent from thinking, imaging, remembering, reasoning, or any mental or perceptual activity. Our positivist science and psychology cannot conceive of this possibility, because they are based on the split that dissociated them from Being, as Heidegger brilliantly demonstrated. The pervasiveness of this split in our culture has conditioned us to believe that knowing can only happen through mental activity, and only through the duality of the subject and object of ordinary experience. Presence is not a feeling, even though it can have an affective component. The affective component in presence is not the quality of presence itself, but the differentiation of some inherent spiritual qualities, like love or compassion. We know presence by being presence, by simply being. In other words, we can experience Being explicitly as a category of its own, and not only as an implicit dimension characterizing existents. We can experience the dimension of presence explicitly, directly, and clearly.

In other words, the revelation of the Kingdom of Heaven is the action of the optimizing force of Being, and only the love of truth can invite and activate that force. The optimizing force guides experience toward greater optimization, which means contact with deeper levels of truth. So loving truth for its own sake unites the heart of the soul with Being’s love of revealing its own riches. This revelation is not an intellectual exercise. You can’t do it through a reasoning process. You can’t do it through logical deduction. The mind at some point is incapable of telling you what is needed to reveal the truth. It is the heart that knows, because the heart loves the truth. To love truth for its own sake means that at some point you give yourself over to the truth. This, however, is not a consequence, not a matter of cause and effect. It’s not that you give yourself over to the truth and then the truth reveals itself. It’s not even that you give yourself up to the truth because you love the truth. Loving the truth is giving oneself up to the truth. To love the truth for its own sake means that in the very instant of loving the truth, your self-centeredness has vanished. This is very profound, yet it can be very, very subtle. It means that in the moment I’m exploring, in the moment I’m investigating, I am in an attitude of giving. I am in a non-self-centered attitude. All of my consciousness, all of my attention, is sacrificed for the truth. Even “sacrificed” isn’t correct—it’s more like, “Whatever needs to happen, I am willing to do it.” Frequently, that doesn’t mean sacrificing anything. It’s more that loving the truth for its own sake means an implicit readiness to let go, to give up the self.

The perception of Holy Work is the experience of the cosmos as a constant unfoldment of existence or appearance. There are several insights implied in this statement. The first is that reality is pure existence, pure Being, pure presence. This insight encompasses both Holy Omniscience and Holy Truth: Holy Truth elucidates the truth that reality exists as pure presence, and that it is everything and everywhere; Holy Omniscience refers to the differentiations, specifics, and forms that comprise that Oneness. To know what existence or presence or Being means, you have to experience Essence—there is no other way. You cannot know it through reasoning or discussing it—there is no way of knowing what it is except through experiencing it.