We have been implicitly working with this wisdom all along—as the unfoldment of the presence, qualities, and dimensions of true nature in our experience. But, in this book, we are not going to focus specifically on any of these experiences because, from this perspective, the content of the experience doesn’t really matter. True nature is true nature, whether we experience it as strength, love, clarity, blissful consciousness, pure awareness, absolute emptiness, or something else entirely. No matter how it appears, it is always the same nature. Our mind and the situation determine what form it takes, what color and flavor it manifests on a given day, but it is always one truth. There are not many true natures. To recognize this requires a great deal of maturity and realization and, in fact, many kinds of enlightenments. Only then does it dawn on us that true nature is the Alpha and the Omega of the spiritual quest. It is the central element in the beginning, the central element in the middle, and the central element in the end, which is an endless end. And the fourth turning reveals to us that there is no beginning, no middle, and no end of the spiritual quest.     

The first turning of the teaching wheel, which can be seen as the beginning stages of spiritual awakening, reveals to us that there is such a thing as spiritual experience, that there is such a thing as spirit—as true nature or divinity or purity—and that we can experience it. In the second turning, we see not only that there is such a thing, but that it is the nature of everything. This awakening brings in the nondual perspective, which can lead to many other experiences of reality. The second turning shows that true nature is the being of all beings, that without true nature nothing will be, nothing will appear, and that there is no existence without it, because it is the existence of all existence. This understanding of the boundlessness and pervasiveness of true nature is implicit in nondual experience and realization. 

When I consider my experience and learning over the past forty or so years, I see that the life that is lived now is not owned by the individual me; it is reality living its possibilities. I can remember that many years ago, I experienced myself as an individual with a subjectivity, as the subject of various kinds of inner and outer experiences. What I recognized in the freedom of the fourth turning is that there isn’t a subjectivity; there isn’t a subject that experiences things inside itself in relation to other things that are outside itself. The terrain changes completely. There is still self-reflection and thinking and feeling, but when that happens, it is at the periphery of experience. The dominant experience, the dominant center, is simply true nature itself, and everything else appears as manifestations of true nature. In an attempt to refer here to a kind of freedom, the term “true nature” is still an approximation; I am still using language in a conventional manner. There is nothing out of the ordinary in this condition of simple freedom. Even to call it “a condition of realization” is an approximation.   

When we stay the course of loving the truth for its own sake, we find out at some point that there is an element of truth that manifests each time we discover a particular truth. This element of truth is not the particular event, but a certain state or quality of consciousness that arises as we discover the truth. When we investigate that consciousness, we discover that it is the essential aspect of truth, which is not a particular truth but the fact of truth, now experienced as a presence of true nature. In other words, to love truth is to love our true nature, for our true nature is the element that makes it possible for us to discern truth. To put it differently, the attitude of loving the truth, of finding out the truth, turns out to be loving the essential truth. We do not know that for a long time, not until we discover our essential nature and recognize it as truth that is not an event or a statement. Therefore, ultimately, the truth is something positive, but it is really beyond good and bad, for it is the ground of all reality. But that is not in the differentiated realm of our lives. In this realm what is true can be harmful or useful, but to love finding out the truth is to love our true nature, the truth that makes it possible for us to discern truth from falsehood. We love the nature of truth and not necessarily the many forms it takes.  

The nonhierarchical view shows us that if we stay with where we are and understand it, everything can be revealed. Our direct and immediate experience is the philosophers’ stone that holds the key to all secrets and all possibilities because true nature is all possibilities and it is what we are. The alchemists sometimes called this magical agent and transformative catalyst “the elixir” or “the water of life” to refer to its vibrancy, aliveness, power, and newness. And when the emphasis is more on unlocking the secrets of existence, they refer to it as the philosophers’ stone.  

Recognizing the importance of the relationship between the particular and the whole—the reality of the individual on one side and the ground of true nature on the other side—can show us that Living Being is not simply true nature. True nature is the essence of Living Being, the true nature of Living Being, but Living Being is reality however we happen to be experiencing it. In the condition that reveals the inherent purity of Living Being, its true nature is apparent: luminous, spacious, and brilliant. In this condition, Total Being is pure goodness and total beauty, grace, and elegance. But Living Being is free to recognize its nature in its true condition or not. It can experience itself in myriad ways, including the dualistic or conventional way. And it is Living Being regardless of how it experiences or manifests itself. This understanding is inherent in the nondual view, but it is usually not stated explicitly. If we thoroughly understand nonduality, we realize that the dual cannot be separate from the nondual. That is, after all, what nonduality means—there is nothing but it, and it is one. That is to say, there is no other place; there is not another separate reality that is dual. It is all one reality experienced differently.  

That is to say, we recognize the nature of all of these. We recognize that true nature, even though it is radically other than our ordinary experience, is the nature of all things. It is the beingness of these things. It is what makes these things be, what makes them appear and makes them available to experience. And our realization can open further so that we realize that true nature is not only the being of these things but also everything about these things. True nature, by being the nature of our body, is our body. By being the nature of our thoughts, it is the body of our thoughts. By being the nature of our feelings, it is the body of our feelings. There are no feelings, no thoughts, and no sensations apart from true nature. As we move to boundless awakening and nondual realization, we realize that the true nature that is our being is the being of everything. And it is not only the being of everything, it is the everything of everything.   

True nature is not only the nature of everything but also expresses itself as everything. It is inherently self-expressive. And true nature expresses itself in many different ways, which we know when we experience true nature as a specific particular—as love or clarity or strength or joy or stillness or awareness or emptiness. As our practice becomes total practice, we can see that it is already the expression of realization because the capacities we are using are the capacities of realization. All that we experience—the qualities and capacities, the attitude and orientation, the awakening and insight—are expressions of true nature.  

The first step is to recognize what True Nature is. This means to distinguish it from more familiar elements in our experience such as thoughts and feelings, sensations and energy. We need to see how it impacts our perception and affects our relationship to our experience. We must know that True Nature is the fundamental nature of experience and understand what that means in order to recognize it as True Nature. The second step is to understand yourself as True Nature. This means having full discrimination and insight, at the adult level, into who and what you are. It is possible to recognize True Nature—the first step—but not know that it is you. You might think it’s God. Or that it’s an angel who has descended into the room. You experience that this presence is empty and light and luminous, and it feels so different from how you know “yourself” that you think it must be some kind of wonderful angel. You recognize that presence, but you don’t know that it’s you. To understand yourself as True Nature means that you recognize, “That is my nature.” And this occurs not through thinking, but through experiencing. The third step is to see that True Nature is the nature of everything and to know how it manifests everything. We don’t know how things work because we don’t understand how things are related to True Nature.  

We discuss the personalization of divine love in The Pearl Beyond Price, chapter 36; this process involves some early object relations with one’s parenting objects, especially the loving relation with them and their inadequacies. The rediscovery or recognition of the loving bond leads to a loving connection between the soul and her true nature. Such connection is not an object relation, because there is no object in the Piagetian or psychoanalytic sense. It is more of an experiential recognition of the true and objective relation between the individual soul and true nature. True nature is the ground that manifests all forms, expressing its infinite potential and richness. Such forms include physical forms, such as bodies, inanimate objects, and phenomena like waves and storms. There are also the essential forms, such as aspects and diamond vehicles, among others. Then there are individual souls. Individual souls, especially human souls, embody the full potentiality of true nature. Physical forms do not; they embody only one possible form that true nature can take. Essential aspects express true nature itself in its various perfections. But the soul is like a microcosm of manifest true nature.  

First we make a distinction between true nature and reality. True nature is the inner nature of ourselves and everything. It is formless, and it is the basis of all forms. As an analogy, consider water: The basic elementary compound of H2O can manifest as ice, snow, rain, steam, or fog. To recognize that the essence of all of these is water is to see beyond the different manifestations or forms in order to recognize their common nature. Similarly, true nature is our innate essence, but we can perceive it only when we see through the particular forms, which is possible only when we experience without any veils or distortions. In our conventional everyday reality, our unconscious prejudices and conditioning distort and limit our perceptions such that we cannot see what is most fundamental. Usually we see the appearance of things and take it to be the whole of reality, meanwhile missing the essence of all we see. This is why conventional reality lacks a spiritual ground. We are seeing the appearance as if it were separate from or without its true nature. It is like believing the true nature of ice to be the little cubical shape it takes on in the freezer tray. We believe that the many forms that life takes are inherently different and separate and their nature is defined by their physical properties. 

True nature is the inner secret of the dynamic of realization, the dialectic between individual practice and Total Being. Because true nature is the nature of the individual as well as the nature of Total Being, it links them as the agent and the grace that illuminates, awakens, transforms, and liberates. True nature is the intelligence and the love that makes practice an expression of realization. 

This kind of reverence, adoration, and love is most concretely expressed in our attitude toward practice and in the way we practice the teaching. Our practice includes the way we conduct ourselves in the world. Do we act according to the recognition that true nature is the magnificence of everything and everybody? Does our respect and reverence extend to other people? We can even feel this reverence as gratitude for all teachings because teachings by their nature express this reverence more explicitly. Even though we might admire the awesome discoveries of modern neuroscience, we don’t usually experience that admiration as prayerful reverence for science. The attitude of reverence has more to do with the sublime and the holy. We see versions of it—devotion, supplication, prayer—in monotheistic traditions, but the attitude of reverence toward true nature or the Tao or Brahman manifests in most spiritual teachings.

Because this dimension of true nature is of the most pure and gentle love, it impacts the soul in ways she has always longed for but could not fully attain. Its softness is soothing, lulling the mind into rest, the body into natural relaxation, and the heart into serene openness. When touched by this amazingly soft and flowing medium one cannot help but let go and relax. Tensions naturally release, anxieties subside, concerns diminish, and activity becomes easygoing and carefree. One spontaneously feels at ease, as if touched by a heavenly soothing hand, letting go like a baby responding to its loving mother’s intimate holding and comforting.  

When essential compassion is manifesting, it is true nature and it is all of true nature. When we are experiencing the boundless realization of the absolute in its nonduality—where everything is the luminosity of nothing, of pure nonbeing—it is true nature manifesting itself. Both are manifestations of one true nature, and that one true nature has implicit in it all other possibilities. When we experience true nature as a presence outside of us, that is true nature. When we see true nature as an angel appearing in front of us, that is true nature. If we see true nature as arising and erupting inside of us, that is true nature. True nature is the mystery that is simultaneously and equally everything and nothing, every single thing, one thing, and no thing at all.  

Since time and space do not exist for true nature or, put another way, since true nature is the nature of all phenomena in all times and all space, it reveals different relationships between phenomena. Singularity shows how all forms and phenomena, because of the emptiness of true nature and because of its being beyond time and space, totally pervade each other. They are all one and also many. They are all identical and also different. And their oneness and identity does not rely on their sharing a common source or being extensions of the same vastness, as is the case in classical nondual unity. The oneness and identity of all phenomena, without the patterning of the concepts of time and space, reveals a singleness that does not erase multiplicity.  

The capacity of this teaching to transform your own life can extend out to affect your environment, changing the way that you relate to other people and the world at large. As you come to appreciate and value True Nature and know it for the mysterious and limitless source of life that it is, it impacts and transforms your own manifestation as a person. True Nature can express itself through you more directly, touching others and opening up the richness and possibility of what it means to be human. That is one way that the flame is passed on, that the light is spread. In my experience, this is the most effective way to support a deeper change in the condition of consciousness in our world. Our aim here is to be the realness that we love, to be as human as possible and to take that out into our life. The more of us who actually learn about reality and our own True Nature, the more others will recognize the preciousness and value of just being. Because, in fact, we are not separate, and True Nature is the nature of everyone. Each individual can come to value True Nature not just in themselves, but in everybody and everything. And when this appreciation is embraced and integrated, it will create expanding ripples moving out from each person. And all of this can happen as you learn to simply be yourself in an easy, gentle way—at each moment, wherever you are.

So for humans, who are operating outside of light, time passes, and things get old. For the light, there is no such thing. Light travels through space at a certain speed, but it has no experience of getting old. It is always new, always fresh, and so it is always itself; it doesn’t change. It is always, always, its very nature. You might not have thought about that, but scientifically, it is known that light is ageless. We don’t experience that because we are not traveling with light; we are looking at it from outside. This is just like looking at our True Nature from the outside, from the perspective of the physical body: We keep experiencing the passage of time, and therefore we assume that time must pass for our True Nature, too. But if we are in the stance of our True Nature, things can change around us, and our body still changes, but the experience is that there is no passage of time. And that is because the experience of that body of light is agelessness, endlessness—always now, now, now, never changing, that ever-fresh now, this very moment always. So what we call present time is actually the intersection between what we call time and that timeless presence. The only place we touch True Nature is in the present moment, not in the past or the future. In the present moment is where True Nature intersects time, because it is the now.  

True Nature is the now-ness of time, but the now-ness of time is not just the present time, the particular moment you are in. When you experience the actual now-ness, it is not an instant in time; it does not have a beginning or an end. If you notice an event happening, you can say that it has a beginning and it has an end, but all of it is actually experienced in the now. So the now itself doesn’t start with the beginning of the event and it doesn’t end with the end of the event. It is always now. You can see, then, why it is difficult to think logically from the perspective of light. The universe appears differently for light. As we have seen, light doesn’t age, and time doesn’t pass for it. So there is no such thing as boredom, because there is no history, and there is no such thing as future. 

True nature is always the only truth that we wake up to, even though it has many faces and guises. It is also the light that illuminates that truth and reveals the truth of our obscurations, as well as the practice that expresses that truth. True nature is the guide that leads us to the truth. It is the teacher that points to the truth, that inspires us to appreciate it and to practice, and that supports us in the process of discovery, awakening, and transformation. True nature, the philosophers’ stone that opens all the secrets of existence, is the teacher, the guide, the truth, and the light.  

This brings us to the second sense in which we have been using the word Being. We have frequently used it to mean true nature, not just the beingness of forms. We used it to mean true nature in general, regardless of dimension or quality, regardless whether it is presence or emptiness. This is a larger category, but we have used the term this way because true nature is the ontological dimension of forms, regardless of whether this ontological dimension is existence or nonexistence. In other words, the ontological mode, or the mode of existence, can be presence or absence, or both or neither. The other reason we have used the term Being in this sense is simply following tradition. The tradition is not exactly that of equating Being with true nature in all of its dimensions, but more of equating it with Reality as a whole, whatever its nature or ontological mode. We have followed this classical usage of the term Being because in our view such usage is not different from our usage of it as referring to true nature. Our view, as we have been discussing in this chapter, is that Reality is actually true nature, for there is no reality separate or apart from true nature. Reality is nothing but true nature, in its various dimensions, coemergent with its own manifestation in the various forms. The forms are forms that true nature takes, so true nature is nothing but Reality seen in its subtlety. Alternately, Reality is nothing but true nature seen in its wholeness, totality, and completeness.   

Anytime we experience true nature, we are experiencing a single truth. We are not experiencing different true natures or different parts of one true nature. We are not experiencing different levels of it. Although in the hierarchical view of the path we discover different levels or dimensions of increasing depth and subtlety, the fourth turning of the wheel reveals the nonhierarchical view of the path. The view of totality, one of the wisdoms of the fourth turning, accommodates multiple views of reality, including the view of nonhierarchy. We see that any experience of opening, any fundamental insight into reality and into ourselves, any experience of the purity of true nature and the purity of reality is as valid and important as any other. Any experience of true nature is as significant as any other because it is the other; it is all others. Each experience of true nature is all experiences of true nature. Each form is all of true nature; each dimension is all of true nature.  

So what is the philosophers’ stone? I’ve said it is our true nature. But what is true nature? It is not easy to find out or say what true nature is. This reminds me of the story of the Zen Master who presents an apple to a High Lama and asks him, “What is this?” The Lama answers, “It’s an apple.” Unsatisfied with the answer, the Zen Master persists, “What is this?” And the Lama keeps responding, “It’s an apple.” After a few rounds of this, the Lama finally exclaims, “This guy has never seen an apple before?!” As I understand it, for the Lama true nature is clarity and emptiness that is everywhere, including the apple, the Lama, the Master, and all of reality. For the Zen Master, the apple itself is all of reality. Even though everything that the Lama is seeing is there in the apple, the Master and the Lama don’t see eye to eye, because they are looking at the situation differently. This happens a lot; people don’t understand each other because they use different languages and metaphors and they have different backgrounds and history, but also because they have different views of reality. The Lama would have to study Zen for years to understand how the Zen Master was talking and what he was intending. The Zen Master would have to study Vajrayana for some time to understand how that tradition conceives true nature. All this would be necessary for them to actually communicate with each other. Both of them are right, in their own way, about true nature.  

Because of this difficulty, many wisdom teachings take the view that the transcendent true nature is unknowable. In our view this is both true and false. We can definitely know and experience true nature, fully and completely. We can experience ourselves as timeless and spaceless infinity, and respond with wonder. We are then the ground of everything, the source of all manifestation, the essence of reality. We are total freedom and bliss, with no conceptual limitations. We are what makes anything exist, the source of all that appears, and the very substance and nature of everything. At the same time we are totally autonomous, absolutely independent of any form or quality. Yet this is not the experience of true nature in its absolute transcendence. It is the experience of true nature nondual with its manifestations. Here we are experiencing ourselves as true nature; we are recognizing true nature in its fullness and completeness. Yet we are experiencing it with the forms and colors that it manifests. We can discriminate true nature from its manifestations, yet in reality we do not know whether true nature will be like this when there is no manifestation. So, in actuality, we cannot know true nature in its absolute transcendence. This is so because there is no such thing as experience of true nature without some manifest form. The form might be empty space, but this is still not true nature. In fact, as we will see shortly, when there is no form manifesting there is no awareness at all, for awareness requires some differentiation, and hence the presence of forms.

All techniques and methods of inner work originate from experiences or perceptions of true nature. True nature is the reality that we are approaching and learning to embody in doing our work. Many techniques have been created based on particular experiences of true nature that arise during the course of the spiritual journey. However, most of the major teachings employ methods that directly reflect the understanding of the actual state of realization, in which one experiences the characteristics and properties of objective reality itself. Only a method based on such a realization can bring about this realization in others, for a method is determined—even constrained —by its view of reality. What better spaceship to take you to a faraway star system than one that originated from that star system. 

True nature is the same in all of us, but the way it comes through, the way we integrate it, what we learn from it, and what we become because of it is different for each one of us. Our true nature has so many qualities, so many capacities, so many skills, and so many possibilities, that each person turns out to be a unique manifestation of that ground of reality, that underlying ocean of Being. It is an ocean that has no shores, no beaches. It doesn’t have an end. But it has many waves, and every one of them is a being—and each being is different from every other. What do we need in order to learn about love and eros—divine eros—and about the role of love and wanting and desire? How can we embrace the excitement of life with all its pleasure and enjoyment? We need to experience and express all of these things, and this happens mostly in relationship with other people. You can definitely have an enjoyable experience with your cat or your dog. Many people have wonderful experiences with nature and with animals. But with human beings, relating is more difficult, though the potential is far greater.  

The dynamism of true nature is the source of all energies, all forces, all power that we experience and feel and see in the universe. This creative dynamism not only accounts for our movements and actions and thinking, but it also generates the wind and the weather, the movement of the planets, and the creations of the galaxies, the stars, the volcanoes, the hurricanes—everything. Some of them we might feel are beautiful, wonderful things as long as they don’t threaten us, and some of it can be devastating. But even hurricanes seem minuscule when you compare them with star nurseries where billions of stars are being created. I am giving you a sense of the amazing sea of energy and dynamism that we’re sitting on. It’s not just idle energy; it throbs and creates and destroys in a complete, orgasmic kind of climaxing. The Quintessence is constantly climaxing—it’s the ultimate Tantric adept. Each instant, creation and destruction discharge the old and create the new with complete abandon and release, going all the way back to the absolute stillness of nothingness.  

As we approach the transcendent light, we see less because we are accustomed to seeing white, colored, or clear light. When we do not see these, we believe we do not see and do not know; in fact, we are seeing black light and knowing the transcendent light. As we are enveloped increasingly in this beautiful and intimate darkness we see less and less of the manifestation, and more of this light, which is pure night. Hence, the increasing darkness can actually be recognized as an increase in the direct and intimate knowing of the transcendent true nature. It is because of this that there is an intensification and deepening of the sense of intimacy, love, contentment, peace, that mystics are known to experience in the divine darkness. When we completely know it, when we are totally one with it, when we are the transcendent light, we see nothing and experience nothing. It is a condition of absolute cessation of the light of knowledge and consciousness, for true nature is beyond such light. True nature is the source of light. What some call a complete lack of knowledge is, in some sense, a complete knowledge of transcendence. What do we expect transcendence to be? It is absolute nonmanifestation, and true nature requires the mirror of forms in order for it to reflect and know itself the way we understand knowing. Transcendence knowing itself is simply absolutely being itself, where the beingness of itself is completely absolute, and hence there is no hint of self-reflection, not even self-awareness. Self-awareness is already the beginning of manifestation.  

Primary awakening is usually referred to as true nature waking up to itself. It is a shift from awakening to true nature to true nature awakening. We recognize “true nature is what I am,” where “I” is a figure of speech. There is no “I”; it is true nature recognizing itself. True nature sheds the garment of the self and recognizes itself with its own light, with its own luminosity. And by recognizing this, we see that not only does true nature make possible the existence of everything but that without true nature, there would be no experience, no awareness, no consciousness, because true nature is the source of pure light, pure awareness, and pure consciousness. We realize that without true nature there would be no life, no experience of life, no conscious experience, no perception, because all of those things come from the luminosity of true nature. In primary realization, we are recognizing that light; and that light is recognizing itself, not by self-reflection but by being itself, by being the fullness. The actual quiddity—the whatness and essence—of light is recognizing its being and recognizing that the quiddity and the beingness are one thing. Essence and being, which are still distinguished in necessary awakening, are identical in primary realization.  

She may experience herself as the conscious sweet light, and in this state she is a witness of all phenomena without being any of them. She witnesses her body sitting, walking, and talking, but she is pure consciousness that is not the body. There are many variations on this state. One is to experience herself as an infinite and boundless sweet light that forms the ground of all manifestation. All forms arise from it and dissolve back into it. She is not the body and not an individual entity, but the boundless presence of consciousness. Another variation is to experience herself as everything, all manifestation, for this is the state of nonduality of manifestation and true nature. She is true nature, but since true nature is the substance of all phenomena, she is everything. This everything is a state of oneness, in which all forms make up one field, since they are constituted by the same indivisible ground.  

True Nature is the Teacher, the Supreme Teacher. It is always teaching about its truth. All beings are its students, and it teaches every moment, for the experience of each moment is its teaching. True Nature is always manifesting its truth in one form or another. It cannot help but do that. It is its nature to reveal its essence, its truth. We only need to see it, recognize it. We see this manifestation of True Nature as our experience, but the experiences we have are just the momentary forms of how True Nature is continuously presenting its truth. So each moment of our life is the teaching. And we can see what the teaching is if we allow ourselves to be where we are. When we are asking, “What is the meaning of my life?” we can see what it is if we allow ourselves to be where we are. Then we are seeing what True Nature is manifesting at every moment. And if we can truly and fully be where we are, then we realize that no moment is better than any other moment. Each moment is—all moments are—the expression of True Nature. There is nobody else, nothing else, that is manifesting anything. 

When true nature awakens to itself in enlightenment, whatever form that enlightenment might take, we see that true nature is not only the nature of everything and the being of everything, but it also is everything. True nature is the surface and the depth of everything, and all that lies in between too. As we recognize this identity of true nature and everything, we see that true nature is Total Being, even though in ordinary experience there is a difference. So are they the same or are they different? Is Total Being really true nature? True nature and Total Being are both one and two, depending on how we are experiencing it. We can experience reality in such a way that there is everything and true nature pops up one way or another, in one person or another, in one location or another of Total Being. Or we can experience Total Being as true nature because there is nothing but true nature.  

True nature is the inner teacher and also the external teacher. How efficient and how good the external teacher is, depends, in our work, on the extent to which the teacher is able to embody and express the inner teacher. The inner teacher is one facet, one face, of true nature. True nature is the truth and it is also the teacher of truth. It is also the teacher of how to recognize the truth and how to discern the truth. Teaching and guiding in an explicit way is the same as the revealing and unveiling function of true nature, which is implicit in all manifestations of true nature because each manifestation of true nature, each form of true nature, as we have seen, is all of true nature. In other words, true nature doesn’t hold itself back. Each particular form of reality explicitly reveals a particular quality or a particular dimension that is appropriate to the situation because true nature is not only the teacher and guide but also the guardian and the messenger of truth. In some sense, true nature is the revelation, the angel of revelation, and the source of revelation.  

At this point, you might be thinking that there is something called an individual consciousness that goes through something else called a process of transformation and results in another thing called a mature human being. And although this is true from one perspective, from the view of totality, we see that true nature is the transformer, the transformed, and the transformation. It is the catalyst for transformation, it is what is transformed, and it is the resulting transformation. By clarifying and developing the individual consciousness and its capacities, true nature, in turn, realizes itself in new and more comprehensive ways. It transforms itself in order to reveal elements and facets of its nature that require greater capacities and more maturity of individual consciousness.  

We have seen that the individuated soul is fundamentally inseparable from Being, while God/Being is inseparable from the world. The three are simply inseparable facets of the same Reality, which is a coemergent nonduality. As we saw in chapter 23, true nature is the truth of Reality, the world of manifestation is its appearance, and the soul is its special offspring that functions as the mirror in which it experiences and knows itself. Separation between the three is nonexistent, and when we see such separation it is our perception that is faulty and our mind that is ignorant. The question now is how did Western thought arrive at the present dissociation of the basic triad if it is fundamentally a triadic unity, and can we find some meaning in such development? In its classical period, Western civilization flourished through the efforts of individuals who thought deeply, and desired to understand life and existence in its fundamentals, conceived their love of truth in questions regarding the triad of soul, God, and cosmos. 

One might be tempted to believe that the spiritual teachings are simply the opinions or beliefs of certain individuals or religious systems, which are not meant to apply to all people. But this is far from the truth. All major spiritual teachings stress impersonality, universality, selflessness, egolessness and the denigration of the personal. It is true that the various traditions differ in their emphasis and outlook; but they all extol selflessness, egolessness and the surrender of personal life to higher reality. The Far Eastern traditions generally see the ultimate human nature as impersonal and universal. Enlightenment, and hence, liberation and fulfillment are seen to be the consequence of realizing that the individual is a mistaken idea and that his true nature is the ultimate truth, whether that is seen as God (Hinduism), Tao (Taoism) or the Void (Buddhism ).

Reality, true nature, and Total Being intersect in many ways. Reality refers most broadly to everything available to perception and experience. True nature is the underlying heart of this reality. And Total Being is everything that is, throughout all times and all space. These can be three distinct ways of experiencing who and what we are, or we can recognize that they are identical. Taken separately, each of them is useful for referring to something specific in our experience. And their intersection is the beginning of a life of ordinary simplicity. This kind of traceless awakening and realization is reality. There is no sense of enlightenment, no sense that anything has happened, and no sense that anything needs to happen.  

But the important thing about any condition of nondual realization is that there is a freedom from the conventional view of being a self that experiences objects and the world as separate from that self. We are free from the conventional view of duality between the experiencer and the experienced, between oneself and other things, between oneself and reality as a whole. In the nondual view, of course, not only is there no conventional self, but even the individual consciousness is one of the forms that manifests like any other. So we experience ourselves as the totality, as the whole universe. We are all the universes. We are the Being that is the nature of the universe that is in constant transformation, and that transformation is the evolution of the universe. In other words, the appearance of true nature is the universe that we see and the experiences that we have. But true nature is far more than only that—it is vast and mysterious, transparently clear, empty and full of presence. Nondual realization is definitely a condition of freedom, a condition of deep realization, and to be in that condition is considered by some teachings to be true enlightenment. 

We fall in love with true nature, but not in the sense that we like it or enjoy it or value it. It is not that kind of love. It’s more as if true nature is the central thing in our life, in our death, in the existence and meaning of everything—there is no getting away from it. True nature is the very heart of the universe in such a way that all we can do is to kneel in complete humility before its amazing power and beauty and goodness. The more that we have this attitude of love, respect, and reverence, the more possible it is for essential activation to occur. And as essential activation happens, this reverence only intensifies. This kind of reverence is a certain attitude of the heart, a certain attitude of the soul—humble, prayerful, and offering up whatever is left of our individual consciousness. In kneeling before true nature, what we are giving over is ourselves. This is something that happens as a natural response to the recognition of the majesty of true nature. When we realize that this amazing exquisite reality is also what we are, we feel even more grateful. And although all of us might feel this reverence to some degree, it can grow and become an abiding attitude that gets more intense as we learn more of the secrets of reality. 

The philosophers’ stone is the whole universe and, not just the whole universe, it is the whole universe at all times. If it were not the whole universe at all times, then it would not be beyond time. And if it did not contain the whole universe, regardless of the size of the universe, then it would not be beyond space. What is amazing about the philosophers’ stone is that it is the total being of all time and all space, but this Total Being of all time and all space can manifest as any particular at any space-time coordinates. True nature is the whole that is, at the same time, each particular that is completely the whole without losing particularity and form.  

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.  

Each of the boundless dimensions in our work reveals to us and teaches us something about reality and about experience. We learn that reality has true nature. We’ve been using the concept of true nature in our teaching for a long time, and now I’m introducing Total Being, which is an overlapping, though not completely identical, concept. I am leaving it ambiguous on purpose. True nature is total purity and freedom all the time. If we only say, “Everything is always true nature,” that doesn’t account for the fact that most people don’t experience things that way. We could explain this by saying, “Well, that is because they are not aware of it.” But when we understand reality or true nature, we realize that people don’t really exist the way we think they do. So when we say, “They don’t understand true nature,” we believe that they are responsible for not understanding it. But when we blame somebody for not understanding it that way, we ascribe to them an independent existence apart from Total Being. They don’t have that; nobody does. So actually, it is Total Being that is ignorant—not the individual. An individual does nothing on his own because he is a manifestation of Total Being. So none of us is to be blamed for our shortcomings.  

But true nature itself does not need to look at itself through only these conceptual dichotomies. It has infinite ways of looking at and experiencing itself. Many of them I haven’t mentioned and many of them I don’t know. Some of them I probably will know at some point, and some of them probably you know and I don’t know. What I am saying is that true nature is totally free from having to look at itself through any lens—whether that be the lens of any teaching, the lens of any experience, the lens of any realization or awakening or enlightenment. All of these are truly the expression of true nature; they are truly awakening, truly realization, and truly enlightenment.