Until you know yourself to be completely Being, you are objectively helpless; taking that prayerful attitude of acknowledging your helplessness in the face of the immensity of Being is not only useful—it also reflects the truth. The attitude of humility and helplessness is accurate as long as there is any remnant of self. From the perspective of pure Being, that prayerful attitude helps to expose the egoic self and to acknowledge its real situation. Then this acceptance of helplessness, without defense, without judgment, without striving, becomes the point of entry into Being and its dynamism. If you refrain from doing when you have the urge to strive, and merely accept the true condition of the ego, Being naturally acts through its optimizing thrust. Through your striving, you prevent, you block and oppose this optimizing thrust of Being. Striving for happiness or striving to attain any other goal is taking matters into your own hands instead of allowing the optimizing thrust of Being to make things happen. So accepting your helplessness is, in a sense, an invitation for the action of the optimizing thrust. We are seeing that allowing and understanding this helplessness is vitally important for spiritual development. Often, when we initially contact our sense of helplessness, it is the emotional helplessness that is the result of limitations in the environment—past, present, and imagined. This is the sense of helplessness we have when we are ill and feel helpless to move, or when we want a day off but have to work. It is also a regressive helplessness, shaped by memories of infancy when our capacity to do and to act were indeed limited and dependent. As we have said, this emotional helplessness is not the existential one that comes from merely having a sense of self. As long as you can find a reason for your helplessness, it is still not the fundamental helplessness. When you finally feel that your helplessness is not caused by someone holding you back, or by your lack of strength, or your smallness, or by any other specific circumstance, you will feel the existential helplessness that is present simply as part of the situation of being human.

Ego activity always has a goal, whether the activity is internal or external. At some point, you see that even when the goals disappear, the striving continues, finding another goal to attach itself to. The goal itself, then, is not as important as the activity, because we see that the goals change while the activity persists. Eventually, when we see that the goals keep changing, we might recognize that the point was always the striving, not the goal. But the solution is not to try to stop striving, as this simply becomes another act of striving. To stop striving, we need only to fully realize the truth of the situation. This means we must first see how striving is constantly manifesting in our life and then see the reactive and defensive quality of it, how it is a response to our sense of helplessness. Ceasing to strive happens through accepting your helplessness. This helplessness is existential because in reality, you are not one who can do. This is the innate helplessness of the human being. In traditional religious terminology, awareness of this helplessness is described as “humility,” the recognition that only God is almighty. So recognizing your helplessness is, in a sense, recognizing that God is the one who is all-powerful and all-doing. This is why many spiritual traditions emphasize recognizing, feeling, and accepting your smallness and helplessness.

People who are oriented toward the impersonal, universal spiritual life have a certain misunderstanding. It’s true that to forget about your personal life, to forget about yourself and become a monk or nun, can lead to liberation and enlightenment. But is that why we have a life? Are we supposed to abandon our life on earth to go somewhere else? The majority of humanity rejects this path, and continues to seek happiness and fulfillment here, in this life. So even though it’s not possible to have a fulfilled life the way most people try to get it, there is something very deep and true in that striving for personal fulfillment. In that yearning there is a seed of understanding that all of this life, including the universal and divine, is for us. Why are we here if the abundance is not our lot in a personal life, if we are not going to enjoy it? The way the ego goes about it doesn’t work, but the original impulse is not false. This is a mystery that is rarely understood. Most people in spiritual work assume that the ego is a problem and consequently miss the truth that the ego can reveal, because they don’t listen to it. We can illustrate this point with the story of Lucifer. Lucifer was the most beautiful of the angels, the Archangel who fell from grace and became the devil, suffering separation from God. The same is true of ego or personality; it has a sublime origin which it remembers, and it longs to return to this origin. The ego tries to bring the divine life to earth and actualize it; but it uses ways which don’t work. The usual result is a personal life which is an imitation of the true one. The ego can imitate only because, at some level, it knows what the real life would be. It is an imitation only because an original exists. It can’t be that we are born to become enlightened and disappear; if we were already pure, why come and suffer, and return to what we were before. What is the point of that?

Understanding this Holy Idea, then, can profoundly reorient our ideas about the purpose of spiritual work. If reality is inherently perfect, and we are part of that reality, the purpose of working on ourselves cannot be to try to become better or to make our lives better. Holy Perfection, which elucidates the objective condition of reality, tells us that reality is already and always perfect, so if we think that our perfection is something to be achieved, that means that we believe that perfection exists somewhere in the future, and not now. We are then taking perfection to be a goal to be actualized, rather than how things already are, and this can only be the perspective of ego. Perfection, as the ego understands it, is determined by measuring reality, inner and outer, against some ideal or standard of how things are supposed to be. The criteria for this judgment may vary from person to person, but for everyone, this quest for perfection is the cause of much of our internal striving. This is not perfection at all but rather, perfectionism. The perfection we are talking about here is independent of these ideas; it is true for everything that exists by the mere fact of its existence. 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.

The approach we are giving here can be seen as radical from the above points of view. The Personal Essence, which is the subject of this book, is neither “spiritual” nor “worldly.” It is the true human being, the personal presence that is devoid of falsehood, without being impersonal. This is not envisioned as possible by many spiritual teachings, although it is not the personality of ego. However, it is what makes the nature of ego and its concerns intelligible. An important consequence of the understanding of the Personal Essence is a new perception of the life led by most people, the perception of a spiritual truth or an essential element in the heart of all ego strivings. This means that in fact most of humankind are not astray in the usual sense of the word, but are after something real and precious. The difficulty lies in the fact that they do not know how to find it. The qualities of the Personal Essence are those of fullness, autonomy, competence, respect, dignity, integrity, excellence, maturity, harmony and completeness, among others. There is very little knowledge and guidance in the modern world about how to develop into such a true human being. The result is that most of us settle for an imitation or an incomplete development, which is the personality of ego. Understanding that ego is a reflection, or an imitation, of a true reality makes it possible to connect to this reality. One need not go the usual spiritual route of abandoning one’s personal life and the values of that life, but rather one must look deeply into those values and explore the true reality that they are approximating. Most people are not willing to abandon their personal life for a spiritual quest, not merely because of attachment to ego, but because they sense a truth in the values and aspirations of personal life. For such people, the overwhelming majority of humankind, understanding the reality underneath ego is a more accessible means of spiritual development than the traditional methods striving after impersonal reality. This is not only because in this method they do not have to abandon their personal lives and aspirations, but also because this path reveals the deeper values and truths of those aspirations and strivings toward actualization.

Spiritual development usually proceeds from the dual to the nondual perspective. The characteristic recognition of the journey of descent is that reality is nondual, that realization and life are not separate. At this juncture, it is very easy to fall into the reification and fixation of preferring the nondual to the dual and of believing that the nondual perspective is final. In fact, many of you might be thinking, “Why does he keep saying there is no aim? Clearly, the nondual perspective is the aim and now, finally, we got to our aim, to seeing the oneness of reality!” But if we really understand the nondual perspective, we recognize there can’t be any aims. If everything is one, how can there be a separate person striving toward some differentiated goal? And beyond this impasse, at some point, we can come to see that reality presents possibilities other than dual and nondual. Reality is quite mysterious—its aliveness is irrepressible. We never totally know everything about reality. The idea is to open up our view, not to fixate on anything, not to try to hold on to anything. We don’t say, “This is reality. This is the truth. And I know it and that’s that.” There is always something we don’t know. And when I say that there is something that we don’t know, I mean that there is something that we haven’t yet realized. We could look at this as related to the fact that each teaching has its own ultimate reality or condition. And since there are many teachings, each with its own ultimate truth, we can see that reality has many ultimates and, depending on which path you follow, you reach a different ultimate reality.

In the Diamond Approach, this attitude of non-interference leads to what we call nonconceptual freedom, which is not striving after anything—not even the ultimate state of Holy Truth. One’s practice, then, is to cultivate an orientation of not interfering with what arises inwardly and outwardly, of just letting be what is. To illustrate this, let’s say that you are feeling angry. If you reject your anger because you judge it as not being ultimate truth, you are reinforcing the egoic perspective by imposing your separatist will upon what is arising. Preferring one state or feeling over another one, deciding that what is arising in you is not right and should be different, even wanting to be enlightened instead of where you are right now, all indicate identification with the ego which keeps you imprisoned in your ideas about how things should be. If, instead, you recognize that the anger is how the Holy Truth is manifesting in this moment, you will let it be and not try to change it. This is the practice arising out of the understanding of Holy Will, and it will lead you to understanding Holy Freedom. You will see that freedom is not determined by what state you are in; rather, it is complete surrender to whatever state you find yourself in. Only then can you be really free, because then everything that happens is okay. But if you think that freedom means being in a certain state, then the moment you are not in that state, you will think that the universe is manifesting incorrectly because what is arising is not what you think should be happening, and you will have lost your freedom.

So can you let yourself be? I am not suggesting that you let yourself be to get anything or do anything, even to understand anything. I mean just to be. Are you giving yourself the simple privilege of being, of existence? Why do you think that what you do, what you have, what you get or don’t get are more important than just being here? Why are you always wanting to get something or go somewhere? Why not just relax and be here, simply existing in all your cells, inhabiting all your body? When are you going to let yourself descend from your lofty preoccupations, and simply land where you are? Stop striving after all kinds of things; stop dreaming, scheming, planning, working, achieving, attempting, moving, manipulating, trying to be something, trying to get somewhere. You forget the simplest, most obvious thing, which is to be here. If you are not in your body, you miss the source of all significance, meaning, and satisfaction. How can you feel the satisfaction, if you aren’t here? We miss who we are, which is fundamentally beingness, existence. If we are not here, we exist only on the fringes of reality. We don’t sufficiently value simply being. Instead, we value what we want to accomplish, or what we want to possess. It is our biggest mistake. It is called the “great betrayal.” We are always looking for pleasure, frantically seeking happiness in many ways, and totally missing the simplest, most fundamental pleasure, which actually is also the greatest pleasure: just being here. When we are really present, the presence itself is made out of fullness, contentment, and blissful pleasure. Our habits and conditioning lead us to forget the greatest treasure we have, our birthright—the pleasure and lightness of existence. We think that we will have pleasure or delight if we fulfill a certain plan, if a certain dream comes true, if someone we care for likes us, if we take a wonderful trip. This attitude is an insult to who we are. We are the pleasure, we are the joy, we are the most profound significance and the highest value. When we understand this, we see that it’s ridiculous to think that we will get pleasure and joy through these external things—by doing this or that, or receiving approval or love from this or that person. We see then that we have been misinformed; we have been barking up the wrong tree.

The loss of basic trust is reflected in the mirror of vanity as the specific reaction of ennea-type Three. You feel abandoned, no one is taking care of you, and you feel that it is all up to you. Since you believe that you are an independent doer, the specific reaction is activity—the activity of the ego, both inner and outer. This activity is agitated, desperate, reactive, and also defensive, since it serves to cover up the specific difficulty of helplessness as well as its derivatives: the sense of inadequacy, ineptness, and failure. A good name for this reactive and agitated activity is striving. It manifests as an efforting, a pushing, a constant, obsessive and compulsive need to be active, achieving, doing, and succeeding. This striving is a reaction formation to the sense of helplessness, and at the same time, it is an imitation of the energetic dynamism of Being. Rather than being intimately connected to Being, however, it is an expression of, and a defense against, the deep sense of helplessness and emptiness experienced as inadequacy. So the striving is both an expression of the disconnection from Being and an activity that cuts one off from Being. It is the activity of the ego which does not trust that Being or God is doing everything, will do everything, and, if one surrenders to it, its optimizing thrust will spontaneously deliver us. This striving embodies egoic hope, as opposed to the flow that expresses the optimism of Holy Hope. Egoic hope makes us react and disconnect from our experience, while Holy Hope makes us relax and open up to the unfolding that is carrying us harmoniously to fulfillment.

As with all of the nine specific reactions, the specific reaction of ennea-type Three exists to support the delusion. If you stop striving, you have to give up the delusion that you are a separate and independent doer. So, to prove to yourself that you are an independent doer, you have to always be engaged in activity, regardless of what it is about. Many people think that the most important thing to people of this ennea-type is success, but really, the most important thing is doing itself. Ennea-type Threes may be successful at meeting one goal and not successful at meeting another, but what characterizes them is that they are always striving. They don’t rest. So while success is important, it is not as fundamental as the striving itself. They are always generating their identity through activity. This striving is true of everyone living from the egoic perspective—it takes the form of control (ennea-type Four) and willfulness (ennea-type Two), for example—but is exemplified most clearly by those of this ennea-type.

And if we have been doing inner practice, one of the more prominent voices is always trying to make us better, more spiritual. We are trying to make ourselves enlightened. We are trying to squeeze ourselves into some kind of state. We are trying to corral ourselves into a particular condition. So, let’s say you sit down to meditate one morning. If you are sitting because you want to do something to yourself to get someplace, then you are interfering. If you just sit—that’s all—without doing anything, you are practicing. But that’s rarely the case. That’s because there are such things as spiritual schools and teachings and practices, so the moment we sit to meditate, we think we are going to do something to get someplace. That is the trap, the paradox, of spiritual practice. You are trying to learn not to do anything, but the very fact that you are sitting implies that you are striving to accomplish something, to reach some kind of spiritual state, or maybe attain an enlightened condition. The moment we go in with that attitude, we are already pushing in our consciousness, in our soul; we are trying to make things go in a certain direction. An operation has been set in motion to achieve a certain result. So even though our spiritual teachings tell us that there is nothing to accomplish, that isn’t real for us, so we keep manipulating our experience. We can’t help but feel that we need to accomplish being ourselves in some way. Now there is nothing new about that self-manipulation; even before we learned anything about spiritual work, we were always trying to change our everyday experience. We judged it and devalued it and tweaked it and squeezed it. We pushed it and pulled it and held on to it. We have always tried to make ourselves feel something that is different from how we actually feel, because we have it in our minds that however things are in our experience is not the way they should be.

Another important factor in the ego activity is that the self is always striving to be a particular way, in order to achieve support. The primary image patterning this activity is the ego ideal. The self tries to approximate a certain ideal, in the hope that if she succeeds, she will be worthy of the support she needs. This ideal is never attained, but the self never tires of trying. Thus, effort is a chronic characteristic of the self-identity structure. This understanding of the ego activity of moulding oneself according to an ideal is similar—but not identical—to Kohut’s formulation of the action arc of the self which is motivated by ideals. Our concept of ego ideal is borrowed from traditional ego psychology, but integrated into our conception of the self. This lack of basic trust is fundamental to the normal identity. There is no sense that the deeper nature of the universe is good and loving. This basic distrust reflects the ignorance of the knowledge which arises only with self-realization, which is that Being is the fundamental ground of all existence, and that its nature is inherently benevolent. In religious language, this issue is understood as the lack of faith that God exists.

It might take us a very long time to realize that this self-centeredness is really the cause of all suffering, and we might continue to believe for a very long time that we will be happier if we support that self, and enhance and protect it. If we don’t see that we need to be free of that self, we might use all of our understanding and experience in the spiritual realm to feed that self, which will only add to our problems. These problems are the problems of the self. If there is no self, we don’t have problems. Each of the Holy Ideas challenges and exposes one of the principles that is a foundation for that self—these are the specific delusions. Here, we are challenging the delusion that you are a separate and independent center of doing, action, and activity. The striving which supports that identity is pure suffering—there is no peace in it. We are usually not aware of the painful agitation of the striving as we are busily acting it out in our lives, believing that it will bring us something good. If we really saw the inner nature of this agitated, compulsive activity, we might not be so convinced that it will lead us to any sort of peace, happiness, or fulfillment.

Perception, intelligence, and understanding operate in a simple and natural way to see through intentional doing or conceptual attitudes and positions. Inquiry spontaneously begins to merely understand the intentional doing, as it arises, or the conceptual attitude we perceive we are taking, or the positions we recognize we are trying to hold on to. It just sees these ego manifestations and understands their significance. There is awareness and knowingness without any conceptually directed interest about any state or condition. Because we hold no position, no state is conceptualized as preferable. No condition is posited as desirable. As a result, awareness is not directed by any of these conceptualizations. There is no intentional movement toward or away from anything; one is just being there—calm, relaxed, with no ideas of what “being there” means. This is true nondoing, which can happen only when we have no interest in any doing because we are not striving toward any state. From this place, there is freedom from all teachings, freedom from desiring specific states, freedom from ideas and perspectives—even one’s own perspective. For it is implicitly understood that any perspective or teaching will be an overlay on whatever is purely arising. Instead, we merely recognize the subtle movement of the psyche toward goals, and that understanding naturally dissolves the movement and liberates our unfabricated and uncontrived naturalness. The pure perception and understanding of what is actually there in our experience dissolves the subtle movement of the psyche. The Diamond Guidance is present and operational as a natural and spontaneous functioning of intelligence and awareness. The result is a discriminating understanding of what is arising, liberating the display of Being from our opinions. This discriminating understanding appear as the flashes of insight that are inseparable from our intimacy with the qualities of experience. We recognize here the functioning of the Diamond Guidance as spontaneous curiosity, love of the truth, and steadfastness, which together result in the spontaneous unveiling of truth, as both unfoldment and insight. As this continues, the unveiling finally merges into a nondual condition—the natural perfection, which is the lucidity displaying experience. At this point, lucidity and understanding are inseparable, completely unified. There is unity of presence and discriminating awareness, which is a guided, dynamic flow and unfoldment.

Most of us don’t let ourselves deeply feel this helplessness because we think it is a bad thing—that it means that there is something wrong with us personally. So we judge it, are ashamed of it, and don’t let ourselves feel it. But when you recognize that the helplessness is not about you personally, but is just the human condition, and that if you completely accept it, it becomes a positive state since it ushers you into Being, then you will welcome it whenever it arises. When you accept the helplessness, it means that you have stopped the efforting. When you see through the striving, you might become aware of how tired your heart is, how tired your mind is, how tired your body is, how tired your soul is. You feel a very old tiredness that exists because you have been trying for years and years and years to do something that you cannot do. The striving has been exhausting in a way you could never let yourself acknowledge before. The more you get in touch with the helplessness, the more you might also get in touch with a specific physical blockage against it, which is the same thing as holding on to the delusion of vanity, of separate doership. This blockage is a specific holding at the anterior fontanel (at the front of the head) which blocks the channel of Living Daylight. When we see through this delusion and surrender our striving and our belief in it, this channel opens up. Then we can experience the beginning of real holding, the beginning of blessing as a descent of light that is love. This loving light expresses the action of Being as it melts the rigidities and fixations of the soul. When this occurs, we see that vanity is the specific blockage against the channel of Living Daylight, because in believing in yourself as a separate doer, you are taking God’s place. In other words, vanity and striving are reflections of the position that one does not need real holding. You feel that you can do it on your own and so you don’t need nourishment—whether human or divine. It also means that you believe that you do not need grace, and therefore block it. Grace is the descent of Living Daylight, specifically in regard to dissolving boundaries, so it allows us to be held by the universe and to trust in it. When you connect with this level of reality, the degree of holding in the environment ceases to be an issue. The environment that allows us to dissolve is Being itself, and when we connect with that dimension of reality, we feel held no matter what situation we are in.