If you really let yourself be here in this moment, you will find that everything begins to glow. Everything is radiant, luminous, clear, and transparent. That glowing luminous awareness has within it all kinds of wonderful qualities: love, harmony, beauty, and grace. And you will see that there is a sense of perfectness, a rightness about how things are. That is the actual condition of everything, but our lens of perception is not usually focused, so we don’t see things as they are. Since our lens has been out of focus most of our lives, we have come to believe that our distorted perception is how things are. To see the world from the perspective of Holy Perfection, then, we have to be in the moment, in contact with our presence, our beingness. Our awareness must be with what exists right now—what we are experiencing in our bodies, what sounds we are hearing, what the temperature is in the environment. The more we are present in the now, the more we recognize that the now has nothing to do with time and that the now is everything. When we see that, there is a certainty, and innate knowingness, that this is how things are. When your lens of perception is finally corrected in this way, you innately know that you are seeing really clearly, and it is obvious to you how unfocused your lens has been. You know, then, that you are not interfering with reality; you are just seeing things the way they are. 

When you experience an essential state fully, you can recognize that it has a quality of perfection. You can’t say that it needs something or that it is lacking anything. If you are experiencing love or compassion, for instance, you perceive it as pure and complete just the way it is. Holy Perfection tells us that everything has that quality of rightness, and not only certain essential states. We saw that from the perspective of Holy Truth, everything is one, an undivided wholeness. Your body, your essence, the world, God, are not separate things; they are all one thing, and that one thing, which is not a thing, is the presence of Essence. Because everything is ultimately essential, it follows that everything is inherently perfect. We don’t normally see reality this way because we are busy looking at it from the perspective of our own delusion. Holy Perfection cannot be perceived from the point of view of ego, because ego wants to change reality to fit how it thinks it is supposed to be. Holy Perfection is a transcendence of that point of view. Realizing Holy Perfection is not a matter of intellectually asserting that everything is perfect so that you can go on being lazy and irresponsible. To experience Holy Perfection is to actually exist in an egoless state and to see the inner nature of everything objectively. What changes is one’s way of perceiving, so that reality is seen without distortion. 

That is the basis of discipline: You do something because you love it. You feel the rightness of it. That helps you to remember your intention to practice and to persevere in following through on that intention. If the heart doesn’t feel that something is right for you, you can’t do it. You won’t feel the motive for it. When you know it’s the right thing for you, you sit to meditate, inquire, and attend to yourself through practice; you find the time because you want to, even if it is difficult. You stay in touch with your belly and, over time, your belly starts calling you, starts rumbling when you are not paying enough attention. At some point, it sends out a message: “Hello . . . Hey! Down here .. .” You become more sensitive to your condition and feel both the connection and the disconnection from Being more distinctly. Practice increases presence and awareness in depth and intensity, and as your presence expands and becomes more accessible, you become more aware of its absence. Developing presence in the belly creates a center of gravity for Being, so that the perspective of the world doesn’t take you into its gravitational pull as strongly. That doesn’t mean you won’t forget, but over time, with the awakening of this center, you will become more grounded in Being. Developing this capacity for grounding begins with taking the time to do the practices you have been taught. Over time, you will see the benefits, and the center of gravity you develop will allow you to stay in touch with a deeper reality throughout the various situations in your life. In taking your practice seriously, you will be able to feel a greater capacity to follow through on your intention to be in touch with yourself, whatever state you may be in, and to be real, regardless of the condition you find yourself in and the content that life brings your way. 

We must remember that the nature of the whole of reality is not expressed by Holy Truth alone. It is described by all three Holy Ideas at the top of the Enneagram. If you really experience the unity of all things, you also recognize the inherently loving quality of that unity. The existence of Holy Love is the existence of a loving, gentle, positive quality. Plato referred to the ultimate reality as the Good, indicating that he perceived the intrinsic positivity of it. We will explore this in more detail in the chapter on the Holy Idea for enneatype Nine. If you experience the unity described by Holy Truth, you will also experience its fundamental rightness, its Holy Perfection. You will see that everything that happens is perfect because all is happening exactly as it should. You will see the beauty and harmony of whatever happens because that is what is; it is the truth of the moment seen without the interference of the perspective of the ego. We will expand on this in the chapter on the Holy Idea for ennea-type One. These three Holy Ideas are interconnected, and together they describe the nature of reality. 

But it would be missing the point to want to be real so that we will feel satisfied or happy or accomplished. No, we want to be real because in fact we love being real. We love reality and we love to feel it, to see it, and to be it as much as possible. Only when we can slow down and rest in the simple, precious moments of living, can we recognize that we love this quality of realness for its own sake and not because of what it does for us. We don’t love it because it makes us feel good or is good for us, or because it means an attainment of one kind or another, or because it represents some kind of enlightenment or advancement. We love it because we know that when we are real, we are home—no matter the sensation or the flavor. Sometimes being real means allowing pain or accepting a painful truth. Yet something in us aligns with an inner ground of authenticity when we are real. We love it because of its inherent rightness in our soul, the sense of “Aha, here I am and there is nothing to do but be.”  

Holy Truth, as we have seen, tells us that reality exists in the now, as the now. By “now,” I’m not referring to part of a sequence in time. If you stay in the present, and your consciousness is really present in this moment, not wandering to the past or the future, you recognize that the now is not time; it is not a point between the past and the future. The now is this book, is the chair you’re sitting in, is you. These are made out of now, they are the now, they are the present. They are presence, and they are Being. When you see the beingness, the thereness of everything, you recognize the intrinsic perfection and rightness of it all. The moment your mind wanders to the past or the future, your focus is not on the intrinsic reality of things. Your mind is focusing on the changing of the forms, and the implications you believe these changes have. Then you lose the perception of what truly exists right at this moment. So Holy Perfection is seeing Holy Truth in a certain way. It is seeing that Holy Truth means that everything everywhere is just right at any point in time or space. When we recognize this, this becomes an important foundational basis for our work. We can then see that working on ourselves is really not a matter of trying to get ourselves to some place where we feel perfect; it is instead a matter of discovering the perfection that is already here, that is intrinsic to us and to everything. It is a matter of seeing through our obscurations with awareness and understanding, rather than a matter of making anything happen.

Holy Love is at the center of the three Ideas at the top corner of the Enneagram. These three ideas pertain to the intrinsic characteristics of the cosmic truth, the living Cosmos, or Universal Being. Points Eight, Nine, and One are, as we have seen, elaborations on what this cosmic reality is, what its characteristics are, and how we perceive it in terms of its existence, its truth, and its experience. We began our study of the Holy Ideas with Point Eight, Holy Truth: the fact that reality is one undifferentiated cosmic presence from which nothing is separate, revealing that there are no discrete objects. Truth is presence that is everywhere and everything. This is the understanding of nonduality or unity, both horizontally and vertically, the unity of all dimensions and all objects. Then we explored reality from the perspective of Point One, Holy Perfection, which tells us that reality is just the way that it is supposed to be, that everything is inherently perfect. This Idea refers to the intrinsic rightness, completeness, meaningfulness, and organic intelligence implicit in this universal existence. Holy Truth is like the existence of truth as one body. Holy Perfection shows that this body has an intelligence that makes it arise in such a way that its functioning is always perfect and right. Holy Love would then be like the heart of truth. When we use the word truth here, we mean the most all-encompassing truth, the truth of the totality of the wholeness of all of existence as one. This level of truth, Holy Truth, is of course, the ultimate truth sought in any spiritual search and in any spiritual tradition. 

Holy Perfection is difficult to define exactly, because like all the Holy Ideas, it is a universal concept, a Platonic Form. As such, the perfection we are discussing cannot be analyzed or reduced to simpler elements; it is a pure form of manifestation. From the perspective of Holy Perfection, everything looks just right, everything feels perfect and complete, every action is correct and graceful. We see that whatever happens is the perfection of Holy Truth, which is everything. We know this with certainty, without necessarily knowing what makes everything perfect. This sense of the intrinsic rightness of the reality that is inside and outside everyone is a feeling, a recognition, an action, of intelligence. It involves no conceptualizing about perfection. Holy Perfection reflects the intactness, the completeness, and the glory, of what is. It is the perception of the perfection of all phenomena from every angle, on all levels, all the way through. This is what makes Holy Perfection holy, objective, and egoless. If something were seen as perfect and another thing not, or if it were perceived as perfect now and at another point no longer perfect, this would not be Holy Perfection, but rather, the ego’s sense of perfection based on subjective judgment. 

You allow yourself to be open. Usually, when you feel you don’t know what’s next, you want to do something right away. But you don’t have to do anything; you just need to be there. When something happens, you’re there for it. Ultimately, trusting is really trusting your essence. That will develop; the trust is not something you have right away. The more you know yourself and the more you see the rightness of your own process as it unfolds, the more you’ll trust it. At the beginning, you will knock your head against the wall many, many times, trying to push this way or that way. In time, you’ll learn that the best thing is just to let it be, to allow. Part of the process is developing this trust. As you observe this more, you’ll see from experience that every time you try to set your experience to go a certain way, there will be frustration and pain. And every time you see how you’re limiting yourself, it will bring freedom and expansion. When you see that many, many times, the trust will develop more. When you really trust, you will see that your essence will always emerge, your true nature will always come through, and always in better ways than you could have anticipated. 

When basic trust is prominent in the soul, you not only perceive the fundamental existence of the universe as a presence whose nature is inherently loving, but you also see that it is perfect. This is the perspective of Holy Perfection, the Holy Idea of Point One. Not only is existence seen to be perfect, not only is everything in it seen to be just right, but whatever happens is also seen as right. Being is seen to have a rightness about it, and the way it functions is also seen as right. So the presence of basic trust makes possible not only the acceptance of what is, but also a sense of the perfection of what is. Holy Will, the Idea of Point Two, is the perception that whatever happens is the functioning of this true consciousness. Out of this perception follows an acceptance of what transpires, an acceptance of the will of the universe, which leads to Holy Freedom, another name for this point’s Holy Idea. If you are in touch with the presence of Being, pervaded by the Living Daylight, you see all that happens as its functioning, and so it makes sense to surrender to whatever happens. You know that whatever happens is fine and, in not resisting it, you realize a sense of freedom, a sense of flow. So Holy Freedom has to do with the relationship of the soul to reality.

We may find it useful to recognize where we are in relationship to the whole picture, but that doesn’t change the fact that each place has its own value. Something is being revealed in this moment that isn’t going to be revealed in any other place or time or through any other person, and it is just as necessary as what is happening to someone else or what will be happening to you a minute, a month, or many years from now. Value is truly nothing other than our heart’s intimate contact with the immediacy of the moment—with each moment, with where we are precisely. In that contact, in that being with and knowing reality as it is, we recognize the unquestionable rightness and preciousness of where we are and what we are. Nothing touches us more deeply than the implicit value of our own beingness. It is value beyond mind, beyond concepts, beyond ideals and hopes and dreams. This preciousness of simply being here now with awareness and understanding fills our heart with contentment and satisfaction. We realize that where we are, which is what we are, is also the most real and precious nature of life itself.