The emotional state deepens, transforming to something more complex. Now I feel a slight sadness, a strange gloom and a depressed quality. I am aware of the soft cushiony sensation of the false personality, and a painful feeling of frustration, right at the left side, under the pebble. These feelings reveal themselves to be a consequence of a deep inner conflict. I do not want to displease anyone. I do not want to be a cause of pain to the people I care for. At the same time, I deeply value and want to be myself, whatever this happens to be ……… The next day. . . The awareness is mostly lightness, space and lack of concern. When curiosity arises about what happened to the hardness, I become aware of the left side of the chest feeling like a big hard pebble, covered with a soft film. The pebble is bigger and moves quickly to the center of the body, with a deeper sadness that now pervades the consciousness. By evening the sadness transforms to a much more intense state, which is not exactly an emotion. It is an unconditioned state of consciousness, an aspect of Essence I am not very familiar with. It is not exactly sadness, not exactly heaviness, not exactly compassion, not exactly pity, but something similar to these more familiar feeling states. The state seems to be more of an intense and deep sorrow. I do not feel sorrowful, exactly; I am rather aware of the presence of sorrow. As the consciousness opens up, it manifests a deeply golden brown liquid presence, characterized by a profound depth and an intense warmth. Yet, the affect is unmistakably a real, objective sorrow, consuming in some new way. The inevitable question fills my consciousness: Sorrow about what?

The nous begins to radiate brilliantly, with a deep golden hue. The insight emerges: the sorrow is about the feeling of badness, and the conflict of being myself and how it causes pain, for others and for myself, even though it is a selfless movement towards truth. The sorrow is about human suffering, mine and others’, and about leaving it behind. It is also about leaving the human personal sphere, as I move deeper into the mysteries of Being. I do not feel that those I am leaving are strangers, for the human sphere represents in a deep unconscious manner my mother, the first human I had known and loved. I see that the sorrow is about the unavoidable suffering, real and imaginary, that results from the process of realization. There is sorrow whenever the movement towards the truth causes unavoidable difficulty for myself or others. The sorrow is also about the conflict, and most fundamentally for the insincerity that I have been experiencing when I pretend I am the personality. It is also more universal: it is sorrow about the insincerity towards which ignorance so mercilessly drives most people.