So the Diamond Guidance is the specific manifestation of the Divine Mind arising in our soul as a personal capacity. It is what gives our soul the ability to know exactly what is going on and to understand our experience. Understanding our experience is knowing what it is, directly feeling it, and having insight into that feeling, all as part of the immediate experience. Because it is a reflection, an emanation, or a particularization of the Divine Mind, the Diamond Guidance has the capacity to reveal our experience, to penetrate its obscurations all the way to clarity and truth. I call the Diamond Guidance a vehicle of real knowledge because its specific capacity is to make it possible for the soul to know herself. And if you know yourself, then you know your source, because this source is your ultimate identity. The totality of the soul is a microcosm of all of reality, the unity of Being. The Diamond Guidance is a microcosm of the characteristic of the knowingness of God, the macrocosm of reality. But remember, on the level of true reality, the five characteristics are inseparable. The five facets are all intertwined and happening at the same time. We have described them separately in order to reflect on them, but they are all one reality. Consequently, the Diamond Guidance reflects all the five facets: awareness, oneness, dynamism, openness, and knowingness. However, the most important one, the most central one it reflects, is knowingness.

What I have been talking about is a perspective on the kind of relationship we can have to our work, to our essence. Essence does not disappear; it will remain with you, as you, but without concern about it. Where there is concern, it is the personality which is concerned, even if the concern is about essence. When you first start working on your personality, you have to be concerned about essence; you need to understand your concern until you’re no longer concerned. Then you can hang loose. I can put this in a few words. Personality without essence is suffering. Personality with attachment to essence is a disaster. Personality can become simply a transparent vehicle for essence. This transformation occurs through the knowledge of one’s true nature—essence, the preciousness of Being—becoming so integrated and metabolized that it is second nature. This, then, is implicit understanding.

I realize that all this experience and knowledge is an exploration of the kingdom, the manifestation of the treasures latent in the absolute mystery. This exploration now is seen to be identical to the development of the soul, leading to its realization of the absolute and its eventual ripening. It is clear that this development of the soul is not only for its development and realization: it is for her to serve the absolute, by expressing it, by embodying it in the world. The ripened soul is the vehicle by and through which the absolute lives and acts in the world. How else could the absolute walk and talk? I am aware that I do not care for any of the knowledge about the soul and the various manifestations; my love is the absolute. But since as a human individual I have time to live, I will live it by purifying and developing myself in order to become more able and worthy to serve the absolute, and express it by being an expression of it. The guidance is finally showing me that the rest of my life will be spent in developing and purifying the soul to be a true and complete expression of the absolute, an effective instrument for it. The knowledge gained is for the guidance of others towards the same aim. In other words, I live not for myself, but for the absolute mystery. The absolute is the self that lives the personal life of the soul.

We have discussed the fact that in the Diamond Approach, understanding is not a matter of mentally connecting concepts; it’s a matter of being clear about what’s happening in our experience by being intimately in touch with it. In other words, understanding is the process of true living. It is realized life. Real living is the unfoldment of understanding, and inquiry is the way that unfoldment happens. As we inquire, understanding manifests, develops, expands, and deepens. Understanding is ultimately a precise, clear, objective awareness of our true nature, for as we understand ourselves, our soul keeps unfolding and manifesting her hidden potentials until we are just our true nature, our real self. Ultimately, understanding coincides with the total realization of our true nature. In other words, understanding is the vehicle for the integration of the soul—which is our normal consciousness—with its source and nature beyond time and space. In the process of inquiry and understanding, the soul first throws away her old garb—all our accumulated images, patterns, and self-concepts. This is a process of purification, part of the overall process of revelation in which inquiry reveals the hidden potentials in our soul. At some point, the purified soul—the soul that has gone through the process of clarification—becomes transparent awareness. What we call true nature becomes the soul’s identity. Self-realization and awareness coincide as a coemergence of soul and identity. Our experience continues as an unfoldment in which the identity stays the same and only the content that presents itself to our awareness changes.

As the dynamism takes the soul into new realms, our Being reveals many pure qualities, which I have called essential aspects. It displays the quality of Love, the quality of Clarity, the quality of Strength, the quality of Peace, the quality of Truth, the quality of Contentment, the quality of Spaciousness, the quality of Existence, the quality of Passion, and so on. These qualities are elements from the beyond, from the unseen world, and our conventional wisdom cannot fathom them, can’t really see or discern their meaning, function, or usefulness. So how can we discern what these essential qualities are? We need to recognize what they mean; we need to understand how they are related to our conventional experience and how they can optimize our lives. For this, we need a vehicle of understanding—a source of discrimination and knowledge—that originates from the same or a deeper dimension than the one these qualities come from. The specific guidance that makes this possible is what I call the Diamond Guidance. The Diamond Guidance is itself a pure manifestation of our Being, which is necessary for it to be able to guide us in the essential dimension. Our Being not only displays its richness, it also provides us with the capacity to comprehend, appreciate, and integrate that richness. Without this discrimination, we are only able to approach this richness as candy. We don’t understand the significance of the richness, that it is really part of our inner nature, so we just want more and more of the candy—these things that taste sweet and wonderful but are separate from who we are.