At each stage in life, we desire love in a different form. When we are very young children, perhaps the Beloved is a red lollipop or a piece of pink bubble gum, and we feel that we exist to slurp our lolly and chew our gum for hours. As we grow a little older, we may not want lollipops or gum anymore; we might prefer chocolate. We want to eat chocolate cake, chocolate ice cream, chocolate cookies. Each stage has its preferences. When we are fourteen or fifteen, the Beloved may appear as someone else’s body. The physical body, pure and simple, may be the Beloved; all treasure seems to reside therein. “Just let me put my hands on your body and I will be happy.” Do you remember? Some of us are still like that—at least to some degree. These examples show us that all of human life is, in actuality, the turning toward the Beloved. At some point during our inner journey, we recognize this consciously. But whether we recognize it or not, it is always the case. We may think or feel it as the desire for enlightenment or liberation. But this means you want to be free to see reality as it is. This is a different language than love, but it still means rending the veils, because we love to see and be what we truly are. A person may never know that he is turning toward the Beloved when he has this or that desire, but the fact that he wants love, wants to experience love, wants a love object, this indicates that love is motivating the heart and wanting it to turn. When we engage in the inner work, we become more aware of what we are really after, so we can begin to participate in the turning of the heart. 

The wisdom of the Markabah is a body of teaching centered around true nature as pleasure and delight; each diamond here is a viscous, faceted fullness that is presence but also pleasure. The teaching reveals that pleasure is our own nature, and that we attain pleasure and become eternally happy by turning toward the truth of this nature. Learning to be loyal to the truth, the soul is developing allegiance to her true nature, and thus the soul becomes spontaneously wedded to bliss and fulfillment. To find pleasure and happiness is to turn toward the truth of our nature, which is the ground of our interiority. In other words, pleasure is not to be sought, let alone sought outside us. We find it by simply being ourselves, by simply being. 

This is the reason all disciplines, past and present, and all religions talk about looking inward. “Look inside yourself,” they say. “Know yourself.” It is not a moral or religious law; it’s just how things are. It is not that you will be good if you look inside; it is just the only way it will work. It is the most practical thing. I have talked about this many times. When I talked about the heart latifa, I said that the main thing is the orientation of turning inward or outward. If you turn outward, not only will you get what is outside, but by the very movement toward the outside, the inside will close. So if you turn outward, the heart closes. If you turn inward, toward your essence, it will open. This is the basic law of the heart. This principle is formulated in different ways. There are two main ways of working with it. One is the theistic approach, and the other is the nontheistic approach. The theistic formulation has been the main approach in the West. The Judeo-Christian and Moslem traditions were formulated around the existence of a deity or God. These traditions say that if you look toward God, you’ll go to heaven, and if you look toward anything else, you’ll go to hell. What is needed is complete faith, complete surrender, complete openness, complete turning toward God. This is nothing but the movement toward Essence, for God is nothing but the nature of Essence, the essence of Essence, the source of Essence. So if you turn toward Essence, the source of Essence, the nature of Essence, you will get the realm of the heart which is heaven. If you turn toward anything else, you will get what we call the “false pearl,” the personality, and all the suffering and misery which is hell. 

Our approach to inner work is not oriented toward solving problems or relieving emotional issues, although that is partly what has to happen just to get to the point of what we do want to do. I’m not interested in turning toward some spiritual or transcendental reality to pray to or to worship. Our interest here is to find out what the present situation is. What is it that is actually here? What is it that is actually now? You can explore what’s really here, instead of starting from a place of assuming you already know what you want to happen, whether it’s to divorce your husband, or to get a different job, or to see God, or to dissolve in the void. All of these things are fine to do in your life. Why not? But how about really finding out what is actually here? Is there such a thing as a husband? Is there God? Is there a void? If these things do exist, what are they? We investigate reality with the attitude of “Here’s looking at you, kid.” We explore with an attitude of affection, appreciation, and celebration. We inquire openly into what’s here, with love and tenderness. So we begin by examining the situation in which we find ourselves. There are people sitting here. Everyone is looking and listening. Someone is talking. We see tables and chairs and lights. But these are notions we bring with us. This is a table because that is what your mother taught you. Your mother told you it was a table, and you heard it repeated many times by many people. You have believed that there are tables. You realize that there are many things: tables, houses, people, emotions, God, this and that. All of these things that you were told actually exist became your universe. And then you have lived your life from that learned perspective. 

We said that the first stage of development is the animal soul becoming the human soul, and this development is a matter of the soul turning toward the truth. Instead of focusing on the surface, the soul turns toward the depths and starts to look for inner significance. Love turns the heart toward the Source.  Remember, we defined the human soul as having a heart. What is a heart? The heart is nothing but the soul turning toward the Source as a movement of love. When that turning is complete, we don’t call the soul the human soul anymore. We call it the angelic soul, or the essential soul, because it has made its turn completely. The journey of that turning is what we call the experience of the human soul. It is the movement of love.  And if we recognize what is happening, the journey of that turning is a love affair. All throughout your life, you are looking for love—the satisfaction, sweetness, and happiness of love—whether you are involved in spiritual work or not. When we are little babies, we want love. Everything is hinged on love—are we getting it or not, and how much and in what way? So, from the very beginning, all of life is this turning of the heart. This is always so; we are just not aware of it as such.  

I say loving the truth instead of seeking it, because if you are seeking truth you might seek to avoid feeling pain. You might seek truth for another purpose, which will then make you not see the truth. But if you really love truth, then you will automatically want to see all of it, not for any particular reason but because you like seeing the truth. So loving the truth is not exactly seeking the truth, even though it might include seeking the truth sometimes. Loving the truth is the attitude of the heart. The heart falls in love. It falls in love with the truth, with an aspect of reality. The heart falling in love with the truth is one of the most important realizations, the most important change, that can happen in a human being. The heart really turning toward the truth is the most far-reaching realization because if you really love the truth, you’ll realize everything. However, if you love one particular state, then you might realize that state and not others. The truth is not just one thing. The truth is all that there is, whether or not you know it. Loving the truth does not mean you love the truth because it is going to help you realize everything. That is an ulterior motive. That is not included in loving the truth. You don’t care if it is going to lead you to this or that. You just like it. You can’t help it. 

The state of poverty is the emptiness within the libidinal ego. We experience it as a state of deprivation and insufficiency due to the oral fixation on emptiness as lack of nourishment. This makes us want to move away from it and to seek fullness from outside. This extroverted orientation is one of the first, basic ego attitudes that disconnect the self from its inherent inner richness. Turning toward external objects as sources of fulfillment is the oral fixation of the self on a mode of operation natural and necessary in the first year of life, a fixation that patterns the self in such a way that it alienates it from its inner core. Actual and severe deprivations and disruptions in early infancy will clearly deepen this fixation and give it a distorted character, but this basic fixation develops in all infants because of their total dependency. This patterning is a basic structure of the ego-self. This extroverted orientation coincides with the development of object relations and the object-seeking drive characterizing the libidinal ego. Thus, the self becomes deeply impressed and patterned by the concept of relationship, which means that it is always relating to an object. This pattern becomes an impediment to self-realization, for the self tends to objectify Being and relate to it as an object. The structure of object relations is experienced as relating, and becomes a ground for the development of attachments. These attachments in turn become barriers against the capacity to simply be. This does not mean relating per se is problematic; but to use relating to define identity is. 

So the joy in the work is a celebration of the truth. It’s not a celebration of something superficial or transitory or fake. When I’m working with someone, I don’t necessarily feel joy about their successes in life. Joy comes when I see the person being truthful, being sincere with himself. Joy comes when I see the person turning toward the truth, regardless of how painful it is, regardless of how much he is suffering. Seeing the person suffering makes me feel compassion, but what brings me joy is when I see the person confronting the truth and wanting to live according to it. That’s what I enjoy seeing in people. That’s what I enjoy seeing in myself. So what we’re exploring here is sincerity as it functions in our lives. Sincerity means actually being who we are, doing whatever we can to be genuine in our feelings and actions. Sincerity means actually living the principles that are true. We can know many wonderful principles, teachings, and philosophies, but if our lives are still an indulgence, what’s the point? We don’t want to be armchair philosophers or zafu buddhas, real only when we are sitting or doing spiritual exercises, but little kids when it comes to living. We don’t want to be sincere when we’re meditating or meeting in this group, but hypocrites the moment we step out into the world. Sincerity is an attitude or a capacity of the heart that orients us toward recognizing the truth and loving the truth for its own sake. But loving the truth for its own sake does not simply mean feeling love for the truth. Although that is part of it, feeling love for the truth will not actualize a real life. To love the truth for its own sake means also to live according to the truth. If we really love the truth, we gladly live according to the truth regardless of how difficult the situation might get. We actively choose truth as our priority, not in terms of what we experience but in terms of what we do. Our love of the truth determines how we interact with people, how we run our life, how we conduct ourselves, how we maintain our living environment. 

This becomes easier to understand if we remember the nondual unity of soul and essence; when the soul is turning toward truth and developing allegiance to it, she is already being impacted by the approach of this essential form, causing this particular issue to arise. As the soul works with this issue, which is being pushed to the surface in clear relief by the grace of Being in the form of the Markabah, and as she manages to make the turn because of her commitment to the truth which she has developed in her previous work, she finally becomes open to the direct and explicit manifestation of this form of grace. In the process of the inner journey, everything is interconnected in a magical way. As the soul exerts her effort and sincerity and develops her love of truth, she awakens and invites more help from true nature, in the form of new manifestations of essence that then help her progress further. The soul’s turn toward truth must be heartfelt, genuine, and deep. When she finally reaches this station, she begins to hear the sweet and merry music of the chariot. By turning toward truth, even at the cost of pleasure, she discovers the true and timeless source of all pleasure and bliss. This vehicle manifests first as a merriment, a festive music, a colorful carousel of brilliant lights, as if the inner space of the soul has become a place where a carnival is taking place. There is an inner hearing of light and festive music, a sense of happy and lighthearted singing and dancing.

What is important in the interactions that follow is not the outcome of the dialogues or the insights arrived at, but the way each step unfolds by the inquiry turning toward the unknown. The teacher is repeatedly bringing the students back to their present experience and encouraging a sense of curiosity about what they are sensing and feeling. Often what arises from this orientation is different from what the student expected, and thus his desire for a particular outcome is confounded. But interestingly, the students are rarely disappointed by where they eventually end up. This is not because the teacher is intent on bringing the students to some satisfying resolution of their questions. Quite the contrary. The teacher has no investment in any particular outcome of the inquiries and often encourages the exploration of some state or feeling that moves into more dissatisfaction or hurt or simply stays with discomfort. And, in fact, the students’ questions and issues are not always resolved. However, the outcome is satisfying because each student feels more in touch with the reality of his experience as a result of the inquiry. One of the fundamental truths of human nature seems to be that the soul relaxes and quietly rejoices whenever it moves closer to the truth of its nature, regardless of the content of that truth.