A more encompassing and open inquiry will disclose to us a discriminating knowingness not bound by ordinary knowledge and its positions, but simply aware whenever positions are in operation. The more open your inquiry becomes, the more you are able to see how ordinary knowledge creates a film through which you are always peering into what you are experiencing right now. Through inquiry, you open up this recognition, this basic knowledge; it begins to become available. By dissolving or parting the veil of ordinary knowledge, you start looking directly, immediately, and intimately, and the experience is now more purely basic knowledge. Observer and observed dissolve. This movement, which is a transformation of awareness, happens through understanding. However, this understanding/transformation is not just a movement from ordinary knowledge to basic knowledge. The change can be the unfoldment in the purity of basic knowledge itself. This is especially true in the third journey, where there is no filter of ordinary knowledge. Experience is direct, immediate, and pure presence that manifests with differentiated qualities. The presence appears as differentiated qualities and forms that are recognized and discriminated as they arise. As the quality or form arises, the consciousness knows it.

This clarification of the individual consciousness involves an emptying, a letting go, and a dissolving of the occlusion and the thickness of the sense of self. The structures and history that support the ordinary sense of individuality are understood and digested. And as these are understood, the individual consciousness becomes empty, becomes more and more transparent, which means true nature is more free to express itself through that consciousness. The more transparent and pliable our consciousness is, the more true nature is able to express its infinite possibilities. Our consciousness can return to an original state of transparency, now with the addition of being awakened to the condition of true nature. The other side of the transformation of individual consciousness is its development. Our consciousness is not only clarified, but it is actually a growing organism. It’s an organism that evolves. Its capacity for experience, feeling, and responsiveness, and its perceptual capacities keep developing and maturing. And the various qualities, forms, and dimensions of true nature are instrumental in developing those capacities and faculties that we need not only for further realization but also for the expression of the realization we already have attained.

Cessation can also happen as part of the love affair that the soul has with her true nature. As she opens up and becomes fully present, without defenses or pretensions, she may feel her intimate love for the absolute. Such love may appear as an ardent desire and longing, or a resistance and unwillingness to keep living in manifestation. She feels she would rather dissolve in the absolute and disappear than experience the various realms. Such longing may lead to a complete disappearance into the unmanifest absolute, as the soul feels enveloped by its delicious darkness, and caressed by its infinite mystery. This intimate embrace can reveal to the soul that she is like a cloud of consciousness particles. As she dissolves she feels only a few particles, conscious of themselves and of black nothingness. As consciousness thins away it disappears in the nothingness. All perception and sensation are lost. There is then not even consciousness of nothing. It is as if unconsciousness. There is absence of consciousness. There is absence of existence, absence and no awareness of absence. It is as if the consciousness thins away like air and the awareness itself disappears. When there is no consciousness at all, there is no experience whatsoever, and no awareness of no experience. Such dissolving is usually gradual, feeling like a delicious melting, a wonderful and lovely embrace. However, this experience is quite informative, for it reveals further mysteries of the absolute.

When we speak of defenses or self-images dissolving during a session, we clearly don't claim that a given boundary or image dissolves permanently upon being brought to awareness, even when the experience of space results. As in many therapeutic processes, the process is much more complex. It involves reactions of anxiety to the expansion taking place, habitual responses to demands from the environment which are based on the old self-images, and resistance to the arising of ever deeper layers of object relations units, as well as the positive aspects associated with the sense of expansion and the intrinsically satisfying experiences of insight.

Every realized human being continues to work on inner development. There is no end to the development and unfolding of essence. This development proceeds by exposing more and more, perhaps in time very subtle aspects of the personality. After the basic identification with personality is broken, the process of dissolving the subtler aspects of the self-image usually becomes easier. It is a continual dissolution of the boundaries of self-image, resulting in more expansion. It is not that personality is gone and now essence develops. It is rather that the more essence develops, the more personality is exposed and its boundaries dissolved. The fulfillment and expansion of essence is endless and boundless.

The journey is not toward anything. The journey is toward the obliteration of everything. Only when everything, absolutely everything, is seen as a veil, has the Guest arrived. Obviously this is not an easy journey, because of the many distractions. There are millions of them; the mind is ingenious at creating distractions of all kinds. But at some point you will feel the consuming passionate love and realize that passion is not just love, it’s the source of love. Love is nothing but an emanation from it, one of the veils. That passion is itself annihilation, an intensity that burns from within, a dynamic and intensely active void. It is the secret one, and it is the Secret of the universe. Only something this immensely powerful will allow the heart to become completely poor and totally empty. That passion is itself nothing but the Secret touching your heart and incinerating it. This fierce, passionate love is capable of dissolving the deepest attachments and cleansing the heart to utter purity.

As you let go of the ego structure, you see that its nature is empty, since it is actually conceptual and not ultimately real. This is when you feel the emptiness; the sense of emptiness is really just the revelation of the structure’s immateriality. As you stay with the emptiness, it reveals itself as spaciousness. Then the spaciousness brings out the fullness inherent in it, which is all the holding and lovingness and gentleness. It may seem that you have moved from one place to another, but that is not what happens. If you experience yourself as your real presence, you just see one thing dissolving into another in the middle of your presence. If you are identified with the structure, it will feel as if you are disintegrating, and then there is emptiness, and then presence arises. This impression is only because your attention is focused on a certain part of you, and so you are not experiencing your totality. You do not fall apart or disappear, although it feels that way if your ego is the part of you that you are identified with.

Since our interest here is the nature of the mind, we will concern ourselves more with a person’s inner perception of himself than with external changes. A person whose “weak” self-image is dissolving sees and feels that he is “stronger,” more capable, freer. His direct sense of himself, his inner experience, is of greater relaxation and decreased tension, both mental and physical. As a result, especially when this change of self-image is accepted, he feels his body and mind are more comfortable, bigger, roomier, more expanded. In the dissolution of a self-boundary there usually involves, sooner or later, a sense of expansion, of experiencing oneself as more spacious. Of course, it is likely that anxieties will arise in response to the expansion, anxieties which will be experienced as contraction, particularly in borderline personality structures, as we will discuss later.

The next factor which is needed is the capacity to be absorbed in something, to be totally absorbed with whatever you’re doing, in whatever state happens to be there. You become so one-pointed in your experience that you become completely involved in it, and so involved that you are dissolved in it. This is a certain kind of relationship to experience, a certain capacity, a certain freedom from the personality. The personality usually maintains a kind of separateness from experience. It is afraid of completely dissolving, of becoming one with experience. When you completely experience essence, there isn’t an explicit experience; you are so absorbed in it that there is nothing but the essence. When you are working on making a table you are so absorbed in it that you, the tools, and the table are all one thing. There is no mind making a distinction or separation in the experience. You can be absorbed in an action, an emotion, a thought, a sensation, or an essential aspect. The Hindus call this state samadhi, complete absorption. In this state the personality is allowing itself to die, to dissolve, to become totally immersed, totally merged with whatever happens to be the experience.

Reality doesn’t really work that way. The reality infiltrates you, your mind, your soul. The reality acts on you from within and without, like a corrosive acid that eats more and more, dissolving you gradually and completely. You have many kinds of experiences and realizations as the reality feasts on you inside and out. You think you are gaining something, but you are actually being thoroughly consumed. You wake up one day not knowing what’s happened. You thought you were going to be happy and realized, but now you see you’re gone. The ordinary mind cannot fathom the reality, cannot know what to do and how to get there. The mind that is a prisoner of concepts will never know the night.

We are unfolding a story. As you fly, the thread of love weaves this story together. We have seen that love is basically the magnetism between the soul and its ultimate Beloved, between you and the mystery. That magnetism, that pull, we call love. And that magnetism is a sweet, pleasurable liking and appreciation. The magnetism is what we experience in our ordinary condition, which is the relative world where duality between the soul and the Beloved still exists. But love, of its own nature, of its very nature, tends to bring you nearer to the Beloved. That means its tendency is to eliminate the duality. More accurately, love opens us to the other world, the invisible world of spirit. The soul not only loves the ultimate nature—whether we call it God, the Absolute, the ultimate self, or something else—it loves it to the extent of dissolving into it, uniting with it. We have been recognizing love in the process of evolution, of unfoldment. The maturation of the soul is a loving process, which also means that the evolution of the whole universe is the action of love. It is the mystery loving to know itself. We have seen that this movement, this progression has love in it and that love is the motive, the driving force. It is natural that the soul develops as a movement of love toward the mystery, and is also driven by that love.

Even in the context of serious inner work, the belief in separate individuality tends to distort the truth. You might believe, for example, that there is a God somewhere who is taking care of you, who is guiding you. But that perspective is a subtle continuation of the ego view. You implicitly believe that you are a person, a separate entity, in relation to some bigger force. This is nothing but the personality’s need for Mommy being reinstated in the relationship with God. True spiritual disciplines say the relationship with God should be dissolution in God. Death in God means dissolving the personality, dissolving the sense of separateness. You are not, ultimately, someone who prays to God. You are somebody who dies in God. Praying to God, surrendering to God, gets you closer and closer to God until there is no separation between you and God. Alternately, you might believe you are somebody who got true nature, who has realized true nature. But the same dilemma arises here again, for the truth is much more subtle than this. The resolution of the separateness has to do with going from ego to nonego, from individual to cosmic, from human to divine. We realize that our deeper nature is God itself. Realizing divine nature means not being an individual; it means being totality, universality, infinity. Nothing is excluded from your sense of self. You realize then that whenever you talk to someone, you are talking to yourself. True love, true compassion, and true generosity arise now because there is no separation between you and the other. You could still feel yourself as an individual who sees how you are unique, but you know too that you are fundamentally connected. At a more intrinsic level, that separateness is not there.

One can be in a social setting, such as at a party, and be totally alone. One is then the Personal Essence without boundaries, and without their basis of internalized object relations. Only in such a state of pure and total aloneness is complete contact possible. For then there are no boundaries, but there is the contactful presence. One feels no sense of boundaries, no separateness and no contraction. One feels an openness, a clear space all around. And one feels a full presence, pure, clean. One is this presence, instead of being the body. And instead of body boundaries, there is boundless Space. One, in fact, is both the Space and the presence. The presence gives the functional capacity in space and time. When this aloneness is complete there is no longer even any feeling of aloneness. The sense of aloneness is only in contrast to the feeling of ego individuality. So one has this sense of aloneness as this individuality is dissolving. But after a while it is forgotten, and there is only freedom. Even the freedom is experienced in relation to the constrictions of ego. After a while the sense of freedom disappears too. One merely is. There is presence, and there is boundless Space.