Some people do feel that what is powerful and scary commands respect because they have to heed it and submit to it. But the feeling of reverence toward true nature comes not from fear but from appreciation. We feel humble and grateful when faced with how exquisite and miraculous true nature is. We can’t help but feel love and devotion as our heart bows in prayer to its majesty. We recognize that the light of true nature, its purity and goodness, is what illuminates all the spiritual experiences, insights, openings, and realizations that we have had and will have. We worship true nature because it is genuine and true, because it is all and everything, because there is nothing but true nature. If we don’t experience this kind of reverence, a door is closed. It means that our heart and our soul are not open in a way that can allow us to be touched by the goodness of true nature.  

At this juncture, the soul is discovering an important feature of the timeless truth of true nature. She realizes that true nature is goodness itself, and the source of all goodness. It is unblemished goodness, incorruptible goodness, indestructible goodness. Goodness is a fundamental characteristic of true nature, a timeless potential that it might reveal at any time or any place. This divine goodness is not limited; it is not parceled out to individuals. It is totally boundless, unlimited and endless, for it reflects the transcendence of true nature that appears in time and space as boundless and infinite. It is boundless goodness. The dimension of divine love reveals that true nature is absolute goodness; it is inseparably both light and love. Its presence and impact on the soul is fundamentally that of blessing and grace, in all ways and in all dimensions. Such goodness is often not obvious or recognizable, but our lack of perception does not diminish or sully this goodness. The soul often does not perceive this goodness because of her obscurations; but although the goodness can be obscured, it is never destroyed.   

The process of awakening is a self-illuminating process. We can recognize, at some point, that true nature is illuminating its own experience by the force of its own light or awareness or intelligence taking on different forms, manifestations, and subtleties. On the spiritual path, for a long time, true nature appears as various manifestations that challenge and expose the elements that form the basis of our sense of self. This is how inquiry usually happens. As we begin to inquire, we notice various structures, obstacles, and issues, and the understanding of them frequently occurs in tandem with the arising of true nature in one form or another. So in some sense, true nature functions by way of illuminating delusions, illusions, and obscurations; and through the illumination of what is darkened, it reveals its secrets. That is what self-illumination means. True nature illuminates obstacles by manifesting certain powers and in doing so recognizes something about itself that it hasn’t seen before. True nature is revealing itself and knowing itself as it is practicing seeing through the obstacles.  

This original Greek usage of this term logos is identical to our meaning when we use it to refer to this dimension of true nature. The term logos, however, means much more in Western history, which is a further reason we prefer to use it to refer to the dimension of dynamic presence. The logos is the boundless dimension of true nature that is both presence and creative dynamism. Logos refers to the fact that true nature is inherently dynamic and creative. Logos is the creative matrix of all manifestation. Logos is the manifesting dimension, but it is also all manifestation, for it manifests everything from its own substance, its own presence. True nature in its absoluteness is totally transcendent, as we will see in the next chapter; but it possesses a dimension of itself, one of its inherent potentialities, that makes it inherently dynamic and creative. One way of saying this is that true nature creates the universe through its logos, while in reality the logos is only a facet of true nature, and not something separate from it. It is true that it is the dimension responsible for creation and manifestation, but this is due to our focus on this dimension, which in reality is always coemergent with all other dimensions of true nature.  

Recognizing true nature in its purity means directly seeing that it is not constructed. Reality is not a construction of the mind. It is not an emotion or reaction of the heart. It is not a sensation of the body. Even though true nature is independent of all mind, heart, and body, it expresses itself through them, maturing them by utilizing them. An encounter of the third kind is the experiential recognition of spirit as spirit—experientially knowing that spirit is and knowing spirit in its purity. We will leave aside for the moment what spirit is, whether God or Buddha nature or something else. For this kind of direct encounter, it is simply enough that we recognize that spirit is, that we can experience spirit without an intermediary. 

This points to something important about our True Nature, our natural condition: True Nature is indivisible. True Nature cannot be divided; it doesn’t have separate parts. It is not like a machine that has many parts, and it’s not even like the body, which has many differentiated organs. Everything implicit in True Nature exists everywhere within it. It is not as though True Nature had love, for example, and this love is sitting in the gall bladder; it doesn’t have a gall bladder. Love is everywhere in True Nature and so is awareness and so is strength. All of True Nature is one unified presence, and the same is true of awareness. True Nature and awareness are inseparable, and that fact can serve as guidance for our practice.

In contrast, during the first journey, you usually identify with one image or another—most of the time with an image of yourself as a child. When intense feelings arise, such as pain, it can be too much to stay with, and self-awareness is easily lost. Essential presence, on the other hand, doesn’t feel pain. There can be a great deal of pain, but essential presence makes the experience of pain secondary for the soul. So the totality of the mandala is always secondary to its center, which is essential presence. The contact with our true nature is essential presence, which in time becomes more powerful, more grounded, more solid, and pervades the mandala more and more as it moves toward the third journey. The essential presence, moved by the force of its optimizing intelligence, reveals more of its qualities and the understanding of those qualities, moving you to deeper and deeper dimensions of presence. This is a very organic, interconnected, synergetic process. The mystery that is our ultimate nature—inexhaustible in its possibilities—guides us by means of this dynamic force of intelligence, affecting our experience in a way that eventually reveals the original mystery.  

We might view this pure experience of transcendence as indicating that the source of awareness is inherently not aware of itself, that it is aware of itself only when it manifests the world with its light of consciousness. Another view is that true nature is inherently a mystery, a pure black light where there is nothing but light, this light preceding not only what we usually know as light, but also Being itself. Since its nature is mystery and indetermination, increased intimacy with this dark light will not produce more knowledge; it will instead produce more mystery. To experience mystery is to know the mystery as mystery. It is absolutely empty of any determination, devoid of any quality or form, and so to know it is to have no experience. This total absence of experience is not darkness, but rather total and absolute knowledge. It is the absence of all obscuration, but also the absence of all manifestation. Since there is no obscuration, no obstacles, not even the distraction of the forms of manifestation, why would we think of it as ignorance or darkness? Why think of it as not knowing or unknowing? Since the transcendent true nature is inherently mysterious and indeterminable, this is the absolute limit of mystery and indetermination. It is absolute knowing. It is the mode of knowledge of transcendent true nature, Being without mirrors, not even the mirror of awareness.  

Student: Is it correct to say that we are doing inquiry in order to get the inner guidance?

Almaas: I myself do inquiry because it is fun. (laughter) We can, of course, say that we do inquiry because it opens us up to the Diamond Guidance. You can say that we do it because it moves us toward the optimizing thrust, or because it moves us toward the wholeness. All this is true. However, if you listen to your spirit, your essential being, why is it doing inquiry? Because it is its nature to do so. It is not really for any of those other reasons. Those reasons are hindsights—valid hindsights, but still hindsights. Our true nature is inherently characterized by an openness and a dynamism toward revealing its potential. And these characteristics express themselves naturally and spontaneously, sometimes as an open-ended inquiry.  

But that is more the classical or Eastern view of enlightenment. In this path, we don’t think of enlightenment in that sense, because we are aware that different teachings have different ultimates. According to these traditions, anyone who has realized one of these ultimate conditions is enlightened in the sense that he is being true nature and is free of the ego self. We also don’t view enlightenment in the classical sense, because essential activation reveals to us that true nature is inherently dynamic, always transforming and manifesting itself in different ways. How true nature manifests depends on the circumstances, the individual, the needs of the particular environment, and the culture and psychology of the times. Because of this creative, inexorable, unending dynamism of true nature, thinking of enlightenment as any one final and continuous condition limits what is actually possible.  

At the beginning of the path, freedom means being free from our suffering, free from our patterns and our identifications. We work with obstacles, barriers, positions, misunderstandings, and delusions that stand in the way of freedom. We become aware of progressively more subtle structures, which reveal further degrees of freedom. As we become free from these obstacles, we also become free to live life more fully. Another dimension of freedom reveals itself as we discover the presence of our true nature. This is the freedom to be ourselves. This freedom to be is most easily recognized in the experience of realization and the experience of true nature, which reveal a kind of freedom that we don’t expect. When we consider any experience of true nature—any aspect or dimension of Being—we notice that in its presence we can discern an implicit sense of freedom. True nature is inherently free. This is a kind of freedom that human beings don’t usually think about, because it is not an external freedom. It is an inner freedom—the freedom of experiencing oneself, experiencing existence, experiencing reality for what it is and knowing it. This is the freedom to be who we are.  

Human consciousness, if we consider it in the conventional sense, lacks two truths that I think of as the twin truths of the philosophers’ stone. First of all, true nature is inherently incorruptible. The philosophers’ stone cannot be corrupted; it cannot be destroyed; it cannot be distorted. It retains its purity regardless of what our experience is and what is happening. Whenever we discover it, we recognize it as a purity that is totally unmarred. The second truth of true nature is its illuminating and liberating power. It is the power of illumination, the power of liberation, the power of enlightenment, the power of discrimination and intelligence, the power of creative revelation, the power of consciousness and awareness. 

The stance of the ego-self that doesn’t know its nature is to fight some experiences and hold on to others. The ego-self has preferences for what should happen and shouldn’t happen, according to its ideal of what we believe is enlightened or not, and what we think is pleasurable or painful. We have all kinds of value and judgment standards about what’s good and what’s bad, what is scary and what is not. Some of this is conscious, some of it is unconscious, and much of it divides us within. This division creates a kind of war, like a resistance movement within us, whereas our True Nature is inherently undivided and indivisible. When you are resisting, you are basically resisting yourself. It is a kind of self-resistance. Instead of being with yourself, you are resisting being with yourself. Instead of being yourself, you are resisting being yourself. That is what it means to resist our True Nature. The ego experience, which is by its nature not an experience of simply being ourselves, implies resistance to being.  

In some sense, true nature is innately indeterminate without being either vague or amorphous. It is definitely clarity and stillness and awareness without definitively being any of them. It is clarity without being only clarity, without being always clarity. But it is also not clarity, because it can be something altogether different. What is it that can be something different? Is there something actually beyond clarity that can be something different? Does this nature have anything besides faces? Philosophers and mystics have been searching for eons for what true nature is. We know this face, we know that face, but what is it truly? We are trying to find out what it is. Some say it is unfindable. Others say it is unknowable. But to say it is unfindable and unknowable makes it into a something, a something apart from what we are and apart from the world. But it is the nature of the world and the nature of us, so how can it be apart from it and from us?  

The first quality of true nature is that it is inseparable from awareness. Our true nature is inherently aware. This is the fact of luminosity, the fact of light, the fact of consciousness. We know this because when we experience any of the essential manifestations, we recognize that Being is inseparable from some kind of awareness, sensitivity, in-touchness, or consciousness. Awareness is not something in addition to true nature; it is an inherent and inseparable characteristic of true nature, the way heat is inherent in and inseparable from fire. This fact is reflected in our normal experience in the recognition that we possess awareness; we are innately able to be conscious and aware. This understanding of awareness is similar to the Buddhist notion of the “mirror like wisdom”. 

True Nature is interested in its own revelations because it loves to reveal itself; it is its nature to manifest. This is happening all the time, but we can engage it as a particular practice. We call it inquiry when we attend to and explore any process that is naturally occurring. When we are aware of our experience, consciously engaging it, and inviting its unfoldment through our immediate presence, that is inquiry. 

At the beginning of our practice, we’re seeking the insights, the recognitions, the significant details of particular experiences as if these were what brings value. As we go on, we recognize that all these are coming from the presence of True Nature. Presence is actually what has value, what is value. We discover that the presence of True Nature is self-existing worth, self-existing value. It is its own value, and the source of all value. As we come to recognize that intrinsic value, we can see that the teaching is appearing through everything—and we not only appreciate the moment, we will make sure never to ignore it or neglect it. We will seize the moment and learn not to waste it, not to distract ourselves. And I don’t mean that we will spend twenty hours a day sitting in meditation or go live in a monastery. I mean that we will be where we are and appreciate being real, recognizing what is really happening and seeing as much truth as possible in the moment. 

But it is actually possible not to get ensnared in reification and identification and all the things that go along with them, such as judgment, rejection, hatred, division, and attachment. What makes this possible? True Nature itself. Because True Nature is what is—it is reality and it is independent of the mind. Whether we reify it or not, True Nature is itself. We may reify it, and thereby distance ourselves from it, but nothing alters it from what it is. Nothing ever happens to it. 

When we are learning about freedom and degrees of freedom from the perspective of true nature, we realize that the question of free will exists only for the soul and not for true nature. You can’t ask true nature whether it has free will or not. True nature is like a natural force. It does what it does according to its own laws. So the question of free will arises only for the individual soul. And the individual soul is also what can experience freedom as limited. True nature doesn’t experience any limitation of freedom. The soul experiences the limitation of freedom because the soul can be conditioned. True nature is unconditional and unconditionable. It is totally free. But the soul can be conditioned because it can be impressed, it can be patterned in various ways that restrict the dynamism and freedom of Being. This is why we work so much with the patterning of the soul—representational structures, delusions, concepts, primitive structures, innate ignorance. 

Boundless light is not only love, but a dimension of love beyond the human, beyond the individual. It is not for anyone, and not by anyone. It is for everyone; true nature is manifesting everyone, and everything, as pure love. And one of these forms of love is the soul herself. The soul recognizes here that she is a manifestation of the love of true nature. She is love and light, a consciousness with total goodness. When she recognizes her light nature, she lights up and glows like a self-luminous bulb, but when she does not, when she is deluded by the ego structures, her light dims and only the external outlines of her form remain in awareness. These become boundaries and she feels herself as a bounded and separate entity. The dimming of the light of the soul causes the soul to experience herself as a separate entity. Only a minimum of this light remains, as her ordinary consciousness, trapped within the skin of her body. Everything now looks opaque and discrete, and appearance becomes a physical world littered with separate objects, dead objects that have lost their luminosity.   

We refer to this manifestation as Brilliancy. When we experience Brilliancy, we experience perfection and completeness explicitly because our true nature is manifesting to us in a form characterized by perfection and completeness. By inquiring into Brilliancy, we recognize it as intelligence. It is the presence of pure radiance, pure brilliance. The brilliance, the radiance, is like white light that contains all the colors of the spectrum. Clear light does not manifest the prismatic colors, nor does black light. More precisely, the clarity and the blackness have all the colors in an implicit way, not explicitly. In Brilliancy, they are explicit but not differentiated, not discriminated yet. That’s why when we experience manifestation directly out of the Absolute, we always see it as a radiance, as a brilliance, as illumination.  

But the fourth turning of the wheel shows us that absolute nondual realization, although it is enlightenment, is only one way of looking at enlightenment. Realization can happen in other ways. It is not a matter of only being true nature. True nature is more mysterious than just being the being of all beings. It also reveals things about being, about the relationship of being to all manifest experience and the question of whether it is or is not. One of the realizations in the fourth turning of the wheel, for instance, is that the questions of whether true nature is emptiness or fullness, whether it is being or nonbeing, whether it is boundless or bounded, whether it is infinite or finite, are trivial and irrelevant questions that don’t apply to true nature. All these are possible ways for true nature to manifest itself, but true nature can manifest itself in ways that defy the logic of these questions. Other questions come into play then, and that radically opens the field of what is possible. 

Despite what form it takes and how it manifests, what is important is that we recognize the fact of spirit: that spirit is, and it is purely what it is, and what it is is radically different. True nature is not a figment of anybody’s imagination; it is not a construction or reaction or theory. As long as our experiences are incomplete in their recognition of true nature, we will find it difficult to recognize its miraculous otherness.  

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.  

The moment you recognize that true nature is not bounded by your skin, that it is pervasive not only in the body but in everything else, you recognize that intrinsic knowingness is not the experience of one part of reality recognizing another part. The intrinsic knowingness is the fact that the inherent mirror-like awareness, which is everywhere and everything, has a discriminating quality. It can discriminate the variations that exist within itself. Objective reality is like an energy field with patterns and colors and forms, and this field has its own inherent capacity to know what these elements are. It can distinguish the red from the blue, the blue from the green, the rough from the soft, the soft from the hard. It can distinguish the fluid from the solid and the solid from the gaseous. This capacity is what we are calling discriminating awareness.  

Here we are focusing on essential activation, the ripening of the enlightenment drive that animates the life of spirit. Although I don’t know all the factors that are involved in essential activation, there are some things that are clearly necessary and helpful. We’ve discussed necessary awakening, one factor that is needed for activation. This is the full encounter of the third kind with true nature, where we recognize through direct, immediate encounter that there is such a thing as spirit. We know spirit not only through faith, belief, hearsay, intuition, or flashes of experience but by full, continuous encounter. We come to know true nature directly—that it is, that it is not constructed, that it is not part of our mind or heart or body or nervous system, and not part of somebody’s concept or idea. We come to know true nature is its own thing. We come to know that this is what spirit means.  

Basic trust is the soul’s way of attuning to a fundamental law of reality, the fact that our sense of existing as a separate and isolated entity is false, that our ego experience of isolation and helplessness is an illusion based on identification with the world of physical manifestation. Knowing that we are all part of one reality means that our true nature is not defined by ego experience or the physical body and cannot be fundamentally hurt or destroyed. If the individual soul is in touch with this reality of nonseparateness, then it will reflect that by functioning in a way that expresses this knowledge. However, to someone who has lost touch with nonseparateness, the first person’s actions will appear trusting in a way that seems unjustifiable. Even to the conscious mind of the first person, her own actions may appear mysterious if she is not in touch with the experience of nonseparateness. For this reason, she can only feel that she simply trusts things will work out, but trusts so implicitly that she almost feels she knows. When the soul’s experience is consciously that of being a separate individual, it can only experience the contact with implicit nonseparateness as the sense of the benevolence of life, as basic trust.  

You might have heard of fictional beings called changelings, or shapeshifters, which are entities that can alter their form at will. You might perceive them as a human being in one moment, as a bird the next, and as a table or a plant or a cloud after that. But in the process, they don’t break up into parts and change those; they shift from one complete form into the next. But we as changelings can actually change in such a way that our manifestation appears as two or three things—often in different places in the field of our consciousness. You’ve probably heard of the psychic capacity called bilocation, right? We do it all the time. Though True Nature can manifest infinite possibilities, including the experience of inner conflict and division, it is not in its nature to separate something out and fight it off. This is because of True Nature’s indivisible oneness. True Nature is not designed for division and conflict; it can’t do that. Only its manifestations can appear to separate. 

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To the ego, separateness means impermeable boundaries, or isolation, but real separation is something quite different. Real separation means particularization out of the unity or, for human beings, individuation. It means recognizing that your true nature is not determined by external influences. At a deep unconscious level, it involves separating from your mother—separating in the sense that who you take yourself to be is not determined by her. This is not isolating yourself, but rather recognizing your uniqueness and individuating. 

Even to say that true nature is invisible is not correct. That means there is something there that is not visible. But who says that true nature is something there that is not visible? I’ve already said that it is not a something. And we’ve even questioned whether it exists or not. When we understand true nature with this subtlety, we come quite close to the monotheistic understanding of the Godhead—something that is unknowable by human beings but is always creating everything. What I’m saying about true nature is slightly different from that because that view makes God something different, something other than or additional to the spiritual qualities that we experience. I am saying that true nature is not different from what we experience.  

What does this fact mean for our practice? To learn to be ourselves, we have to start with what we have—and what we always have is our experience in the moment. If we allow ourselves to be in our experience in the moment—to feel it, to see it, to taste it, to hear it, to smell it, to be aware of it—it becomes possible for us to find out what we are and to be who we are. To be ourselves, or to be real, basically means that we are being our true self, or we are being the realness of who we are. You may have heard it said, “My True Nature means the true or the self-existing nature of who I am.” That can sound esoteric, but it just means that your True Nature is not false, not fabricated, not created by anybody; it is what you truly are. It is the real you. Being who we are requires first finding out where we are. And although being aware of where we are does not necessarily mean we are being ourselves yet, it’s a start. That’s because it contains an element or flavor of our true self. And that flavor, or that element, is what we call “truth.” So wherever we are, whatever our experience happens to be, is related to our True Nature in some way. It may be distant or disconnected, or it may be a reaction, a reflection, or a substitute. But it still is somehow related to who we truly are.  

When I am my True Nature as a being of light, I am like a field, a presence, an effulgence. This doesn’t mean that I am like the steady bright light we experience coming from the sun. Our True Nature is not just a medium of light, a transparent, luminous presence. It is magical light—light that continues to be a light but is always changing. It changes its color, its shape, its density, its texture. It can actually take on the forms of emotions, thoughts, images, and sensations. This light that I am is always forming itself into one thing or another. And this forming itself into one thing or another I recognize as the various experiences that I have. If the light is sometimes a white light and sometimes a green light, we might think this means that first it was white and then it became green and therefore some time must have passed. But if we are in the light, if we are the light, the change from white to green is not from the past to the future. Transformation does not occur in a progression from the past to the present to the future, which is how we usually think of it and experience it.  

What is that emptiness? It is a way of experiencing the lack of connection to our true nature. In our natural condition, when we are connected we are open and available to the presence of Being and the pure openness of the void, the two sides of our true nature. The void side of true nature is not lacking in any way. It is the simple, clear purity of openness itself, without which true selfless love is not possible. From the inherent potential in this openness can arise a love that is a giving, loving fullness. However, when the presence of our nature is missing and we feel the disconnection, we feel emptiness. This emptiness is not spacious, open, clear, and bright. No, this is a deficient emptiness, which is more a dull, murky darkness accompanied by the specific sense of lack. “I don’t have love; I don’t have sufficiency; something is missing . . .” This territory is difficult for us because we sense that if we really feel the desire and need, it will take us into that deficient emptiness—and it can! The two go hand in hand: The need and the emptiness are two sides of the same thing. So we desire something to fill the emptiness, and we become focused on having to get something that will do that. But if we actually feel the need and desire, and we follow them to the underlying energetic presence, we find that it is much more than we originally felt it to be. Just as it is with love, following our feelings invites the emptiness to open up, and this emptiness then can become the conduit for change because it is the beginning of the appearance of the spaciousness of our true nature.  

True nature, however, is much freer than all of that. True nature cannot be exhausted or defined by any of these experiences, no matter how lofty or how total they are. True nature is not limited to any one of its faces. We cannot hold fast one face of true nature and say that is true nature. We can, of course, say that face is true nature completely, but we cannot say that it is true nature exclusively. Because of its dynamism, because of its property of red sulfur, true nature can never be pinned down to only one of its faces.  

It is the nature of our True Nature to be not only a presence but a dynamic presence, a dynamism that is always disclosing its potential, revealing all the forms it can possibly be. True Nature is not a monolithic presence that stays the same; it is constantly transforming, always responding to what is going on. And it always continues to be True Nature. Sometimes we experience ourselves in a dimension of True Nature that is unchanging. But even though the ground of True Nature is unchanging, that ground is not separate from all that manifests in it, and all of those manifestations are constantly changing. True Nature is rich with possibilities; its potential is immense and it never ceases to disclose its treasures. It is always revealing its potential, displaying all the forms possible. 

The fifth major characteristic of true nature is that it is not only awareness, oneness, dynamism, and openness, but also knowingness. This is similar to the Buddhist notion of the “wisdom of discrimination,” or the discriminating awareness of the Buddha. It is inherent to essential presence that it is not only awareness of presence but simultaneously the discrimination of the particular quality of presence, such as Compassion or Peace. This knowingness is inherent to presence, inherent to the awareness of presence. It is not that presence arises and a separate awareness knows it as Compassion. In fact, sometimes a quality arises that you are not familiar with, but the presence itself tells you what it is. Many people, for instance, do not know there is such a thing as the presence of Value. But if they pay attention when it arises, they recognize, “Oh yeah, this feels like value. I feel worthy, I have worth.” So presence has in it—intrinsic to it—knowingness. 

From this understanding, we can see how true nature is Total Being. When we are experiencing it in the conventional way—the normal egoic or dualistic way—Total Being seems to be different from true nature. Total Being is everything, with lots of elements that we would not consider to be the purity of true nature. We see hatred and destruction, violence and ignorance, all of which are included in Total Being; but true nature appears as this purity, this awareness, this emptiness, this openness, this compassion, this love that is at the heart of reality. So it seems to us that there is a distinction between the totality of reality and true nature. This persists in our experience until we realize we are true nature. When we realize we are true nature, we realize that true nature is not only the nature of everything—including the good, the bad, and the ugly—but it is those things. There is nothing other than true nature.  

When we see that awakening is the self-illumination of true nature, this doesn’t mean that we should stop practicing. It doesn’t mean that we get a free pass and can be lazy and simply rely on true nature to do the job. It means that in our practice, what we have faith in is not the mind or the heart or the body but true nature and its truth and love and power. This trust is similar to how the monotheistic traditions talk about faith in God, except here it is not faith in an other. True nature is not something outside of us or other than us. We completely trust the truth of true nature, and we have unwavering faith in its loving and illuminating and liberating power. The only thing left for us to do in the light of this kind of faith is to stay oriented toward true nature. We continue whatever practice we are doing without believing that we are making any illuminations happen, without believing that our practice or our capacities are what make awakening occur.  

When I talk about awakening, I mean waking up: recognizing the purity that is at the heart of reality—the purity that is true nature. I call true nature the heart of reality because I want to leave it a little ambiguous. If I call it the source of reality or the nature of reality, I introduce inaccuracies. True nature is so mysterious that it is nothing in particular and, at the same time, it is the purity at the heart of reality that makes realization and spiritual experience possible. Spirit is so mysterious that we can’t even say that it exists or does not exist; and yet, it manifests itself as existence and nonexistence and all sorts of other possibilities too.