In essential experience, however, the Self is not only definite and singular, but also feels like a sense of freedom, lightness, joy and delight, as we saw in the report above. There is a sense of excitement, playfulness and adventure. One suddenly feels interested in oneself, excited about one’s life, wanting to live and enjoy it. One feels one’s own preciousness and specialness, and the preciousness and delight of living. Life feels like an adventure, of unlimited potential and exciting possibilities.

This clarifies what the ultimate service is. You do not work on yourself to become enlightened; you work on yourself so that God can do what God wants to do, which is to reveal himself. So our delight in investigating reality is an adventure of consciousness, which is the human participation in God’s enjoyment of self-revelation. People often misunderstand the Diamond Approach to inquiry, thinking that it is a way to solve their problems. But we do the Work because it is a labor of love, a passion, a celebration. We work on personal issues because we need to work on them to be able to continue this exploration, not because we want to get rid of our personal difficulties.

The realization of the Personal Essence, the personalization of aspects, and essential development in general, are processes of radical expansion. One experiences a steady expansion, in continual tiny increments, in one’s experience, consciousness, capacities and life. One’s mind is almost constantly being stretched, its limits pushed farther out. The changes are profound and deep, and affect the organism even at the cellular level. In fact one finds oneself always changing one’s mind about who one is and what life is all about. The experience of expansion involves delight, beauty and a sense of adventure. But sooner or later one does come upon one’s personal limitations. When an individual is experiencing expansion in a certain realm, a part of him that feels he cannot do it, that the expansion is too much, comes to the surface. He starts feeling a sense of deficiency, smallness, weakness and inadequacy. This inadequacy is rarely felt as directly related to the process of realization itself, but manifests in some situation in the student’s life.

The unfoldment of the soul is an adventure full of thrill and terror. It magnifies various life conflicts, as it discloses the essential manifestations that resolve them. This process exposes character deficiencies, ignorance, and wrong beliefs and positions. It involves intense pain, rage, terror and uncertainty. For one who truly pursues truth, however, these difficulties are not obstacles but occasions for further revelations of truth. Inner conflicts and difficulties always turn out to be caused by ignorance. Being, the ground and source of all that is, has by this time disclosed to me my personal nature. In the realization of the universal witness, it has begun to disclose the nature of the world. This realization has shown me that my experience of the world had not been direct, but had been mediated by my personal view. Understanding this led to intimations of what the real world is, unobscured by mind.

There is no end to the adventure of Being — Being is infinite and its possibilities are endless. One reason why I prefer the path of inquiry to predetermined and goal-oriented spiritual practices is that it reflects a certain understanding of the nature of being human, which has to do with the essence of Being. The more I know the essence of my Being, the more I recognize that it is indeterminable, it is not knowable in an ultimate and complete way. You cannot say in any definite way that it is a such and such and such. It is the very nature of the essence of our Being that it is a mystery. It is a mysterious essence. Its mystery is not due to a limitation in our capacity to understand it; its mystery is intrinsic to its reality. This mystery, this sense of indeterminacy, has been explored by many people, and many teachings and formulations exist to describe it. One way of looking at it is that the ultimate nature of things cannot be described, cannot be determined. You cannot make any definite statement about it, you cannot take any position about it. Some equate ultimate nature with emptiness but are quick to say that there is no “something” there called emptiness. Emptiness is simply a way of referring to the indeterminacy of ultimate nature. This means that you cannot say it exists, you cannot say it does not exist, and you cannot say it neither exists nor doesn’t exist. This way is called the way of negation, in the sense that you negate everything you can say or determine about ultimate nature.

What I am saying is that for inquiry to happen, we first need to see and acknowledge what we do not know. This requires investigating what we believe we do know. And that means we need to be courageous enough to be open to the possibility of questioning everything we believe we know. The more we are willing to accept not-knowing, and the more this not-knowing pervades our experience, the more our inquiry embodies courage and openness, which will make it more effective. In other words, we need the courage and openness to embody, to embrace, the not-knowing all the time. The moment we rest, having concluded that what we know about something is final, we close the door to knowledge and we inhibit Being from disclosing its further and infinite possibilities. We lose the sense of adventure in our experience. To be an adventurer of Being requires that we stay always on the edge of knowledge, where knowledge appears and disappears, where it is created and destroyed. This is the nature of revelation: It is a process of the creation and destruction of knowledge because not-knowing is the ground from which knowledge arises. This demonstrates another reason to have a healthy respect and appreciation for not-knowing: Not-knowing is the entry to the adventure of discovery. In time, you may recognize that not-knowing is the way Being opens up to its own mysteriousness. In fact, this not-knowing is the direct expression of the Mystery itself.

Do not misinterpret what I’m saying. I’m not saying that you must not pursue what you’re pursuing. I’m not saying that you must sit home and think about what the precious pearl is. I’m saying that whatever you’re doing is a distortion of the real thing until your orientation is toward Essence and you have actualized the Personal Essence. Because your personality is a distortion of the real thing, it can point to the real thing. By understanding it, you can begin to see what the truth is in you that is being reflected. The saying isn’t “not of the world”; it is “in the world but not of it.” When you are “in the world,” you are not meditating on some mountain, not living in a monastery. You’re actually living the life of the world. Your life is an adventure, and whatever you are doing in the world is not an end in itself but is a crucible for melting the ore into gold. Once you know yourself to be the Personal Essence, what you do doesn’t much matter. You choose whatever will enlarge and enhance your real self. There can never be a sense of lasting fulfillment unless you have realized that essential part of yourself. Nothing else can take its place.