It is not that there is a formless or boundless dimension that pervades everything or is the essence or everything, since seeing it this way creates a dichotomy that does not exist. It is not as though there is me and there is my essential nature. The formless dimensions bring in another kind of perception, which is of Being as a formless, boundless, real existence, a substantial presence that is not contained by any boundary. When you experience pure, translucent, self-existing boundless presence, you see that it is not only the fundamental nature of Essence itself, but also of everything that exists. It exists in everything, and everything exists in it. We see here that the universe is ultimately pure Being, and that this pure Being not only supports us, infuses us, and is our nature, but more fundamentally, that it constitutes us. It is completely inseparable from what we are. So it not only pervades and fills the universe, but it is the universe. This understanding that there is no universe separate from this pure boundless self-existing Beingness is a more complete level of the truth. The perception that Being constitutes the totality of everything is what is generally called a mystical experience. Before this, you may have spiritual experiences, but when you experience the oneness and the unity of existence, you are on the level of the mystical. In the dimension of Living Daylight, you experience that everything is made out of love. When you look around you, everything might appear, for example, to be made out of a pink and sweet diamond-like taffy substance, and be pervaded with a wonder, a beauty, and a sweetness.

The issue of the extension object relation makes it very difficult to experience and integrate the Holy Idea of Transparency. Because of it, one either resists the experience or becomes attached to being an extension in a way that continues to support the personality. Holy Transparency means experiencing things without your personal mind. Then, as an individual, you are an extension of the universe, an extension of the Holy Truth—and not as a mental construct, not with an image in your mind that you are an extension of the universe. It is only as part of the extension object relation that one has an image of oneself as one side or the other of a merged relationship. After you work through the need to be the center, being an extension of the universe feels like a great relief. Needing to be the center of the extension object relation is a big job, since you are holding yourself as God. In the pure experience of direct union with the living universe, you know yourself to be completely supported, completely loved, completely held, and completely taken care of as a human being. The living consciousness of the universe is above you, surrounding you, within you, and you know that you are a part of it. This brings a wonderful sense of relaxation and joy. A sense of tremendous preciousness and value arises as you see that not only do you need the living universe to exist and support you, but that without you, that living universe would be blind. You are not expendable.

We might think that if we are experiencing the absolute given of our perception of ourselves, we will be experiencing our bodies. However, even our experience of our bodies is greatly influenced by the various images, memories, emotional reactions, and associations that are characteristic of the conventional dimension of experience. Ordinarily, we do not really know what the pure experience of the body is; we cannot be aware of how and how much the content of the mind influences our experience of our bodies. The dawning of the experience of self-realization includes the body, but it is not what we usually experience as our body. The body is experienced as part of Being, inseparable from Being, as an embodied expression of Being. But the pure experience of being ourselves is not merely the experience of the body. Being is more than the felt existence of our bodies. In many ways, it includes and transcends the body. Both “common sense” and certain theories of the self consider the body to be the most fundamental reality, but the phenomenon of presence is far more fundamental.

The primordial presence, on the other hand, is nondual in all respects. The sense of wholeness means all dimensions of the self—the conventional and the essential—constitute one indivisible whole. We experience everything as presence, including thoughts and feelings. We are a presence coemergent with the body; the body feels like a part of this presence. This is also true of images, feelings, and activities. At this level even the ego structures, with their images and object relations, are seen to be part of this presence. We are aware of these structures of internalized images, but they appear as less luminous patterns within the overall presence. There is one presence, whole, continuous and homogeneous, clear and transparent . . . . . . . . So the fundamental ground is the pure presence, and it is this which we experience as our true identity. This development is the pure experience of the soul in complete identity with its true nature. The self becomes the open, flowing experience of soul, aware of its true nature by simply being it. The soul knows itself as primordial presence. This presence is the very substance and existence of all the forms appearing within it; hence, we experience all the forms, all dimensions of experience, as part of our sense of self, without separateness. This is not a matter of a lack of differentiation, since one can discriminate forms within this changing presence. It is rather the absence of separateness and duality. This is the wholeness of primordial presence, where the purity of Being is the fundamental fabric, and all other dimensions and elements are the patterns in this fabric.

The second and third ways of experiencing Being arise from the functions of the Essential Identity. We have said that the Essential Identity provides the capacity to situate one’s awareness in any form or dimension of Being. For instance, we may experience Being in the aspect of Truth, not in a subject-object relationship, but by experiencing ourselves from within and through essential Truth. In this direct experience of Truth we do not perceive ourselves experiencing Truth, but we are present as Truth. We recognize ourselves as the presence of Truth. We do not feel like an individual self experiencing Truth, but more like the presence of consciousness intimately aware of itself as Truth. There is no question of self experiencing Truth. The presence of Truth is the same, here, as the awareness of Truth. The awareness is identical to the presence, which is identical to the Truth. It is like solid gold aware of itself in each atom. This awareness of itself has the specific cognition of Truth. This is the pure experience of Being in the aspect of Truth. The third way of experiencing Being is similar to the second, with an added quality. The Essential Identity provides the self not only with the capacity to situate awareness within Essence, but also provides the feeling of identity. In the experience of oneself as Truth, the identity is not experienced as separate from the essential presence, Truth, but as indistinguishable from it. So rather than experiencing ourselves as Truth experiencing itself as Truth, we experience the Truth as self. In other words, the sense of identity makes our identity the essential quality of Truth.

The pure experience of true nature, in its absolute timelessness and spacelessness, is the experience of the unmanifest. In other words, true nature in its true and transcendent truth is unmanifest. The universe, with its space-time, and its underlying spiritual dimensions, is the manifest.

Our true nature is a sense of presence, the quality of immediacy, of beingness. That is why I frequently call true nature “Being”—it only exists in the direct present-time experience of being here now. I use the term “Being” in a general way, to refer to the whole range of subtlety in how presence manifests. The purest experience of that presence is true nature. True nature is the absolute purity of Being. When we recognize that true nature is presence, we also see that this presence has many properties that let us approach our beingness in various ways. Each spiritual method can be seen as reflecting certain of those properties. The practice of being present is a method that comes from the recognition of presence as the fundamental nature of reality. The practice of inquiry, which incorporates the practice of presence, reflects other properties of true nature as well.