The love is before and after absolute absence. If you are absence, you don’t love it. We are always coming from absence but are not always aware of it. Similarly, our love and longing always ultimately have to do with the absence, even though we are not aware of it directly. After we have the experience of absence, we’re generally more clear about our longing and love, as some sense of the taste of absence remains with us. We are more used to thinking of our love and longing as having to do with what we call the Absolute. This is more obviously the Beloved of our heart. It is more difficult to see how the love is for absence. But absence is actually the essence of the Absolute. And when we experience absence, it is so unexpected and unfamiliar that at first we don’t associate it with what we have thought of as the Absolute. Loving the Absolute involves a separation from the Absolute. If you are separate from the Absolute, or if you are not totally the absolute absence but are aware of it, then you might love it. If you separate more from the Absolute, you long for it. If you withdraw even further from the Absolute, then you forget it. That’s how the journey of return or discovery goes: forgetfulness, discontent, longing, love, complete cessation.  

There is very often a connection between essence and vision, but usually the connection is concealed from the visionary. However, if this connection is seen and understood, then the person can use the vision to contact essence directly. What happens is that the individual experiences a taste of essence but is not directly aware of it. His contact with essence touches him in a deep way and produces deep emotions, which are translated in the mind into religious symbols and images. In some cases the images come first, and seeing the images provokes deep religious emotions. The individual is usually aware only of the images and emotions. But these are simply reverberations in the mind of the contact with essence. The relation of visions to the essential experience is like the relation of dreams to the reality they express. The dreams are distorted and symbolic images of processes that the dreamer is not directly aware of. Obviously, if the person focuses his attention on the images and emotions of a vision, he will miss entirely the true underlying reality, the presence of essence. The visionary experiences will seem unique and special and will not be used to deepen understanding. Often the person feels blessed, and the people around him consider him to be spiritual. The individual actually is blessed, but he is blessed by the contact with essence, not by the vision. In fact, the vision, as we have seen, can be a barrier, a veil over the real essential experience. 

The view of totality liberates freedom from being defined by any particular experience or realization. Freedom, at some point, becomes free of realization because true nature itself is free and has no limits. Even though, as we have seen, freedom is present in any experience of realization, the view of totality also shows that freedom is not specific to any particular realization, aspect, or dimension. Each of these gives a taste of freedom, but freedom is something more mysterious than that. And the view of totality keeps liberating freedom from anything that we could connect with freedom. Freedom, at some point, liberates itself from all associations, including the association to true nature. The view of totality allows this because any perspective that arises is welcome and enriches the view. As our range of freedom expands—from being free from suffering to being free to experience presence and realization—we can come to a place where we don’t know who it is or what it is that is enjoying the freedom. Because it is free from perspective and position, freedom becomes, in some deep way, freedom from any sense of self. Yet, at the same time, we are the particular individual for whom freedom is relevant; we live a personal life that is significant and that needs to be addressed, lived, and enjoyed. My experience is that the more freedom there is, the more there is heart, the more there is love, the more there is enjoyment and appreciation, and the more there is clarity and understanding in living as an individual. 

So there is something in insight that allows us to know directly, without questioning, that something is true, more so than in the experience of ordinary perception. That sense of certainty seems to be intimately linked with the sense of satisfaction, a sense of being more intimate with oneself, closer to oneself. What does it mean to get more intimate and closer to yourself? There’s more warmth, more satisfaction. There’s a sense of freedom and truth. The facts have led us there, although the facts were not exactly what we were looking for. What we’re looking for is that sense of intimacy, closeness, freedom, satisfaction. Now we’re seeing how knowing the truth will set you free. We’re getting the taste of freedom, the taste of satisfaction. Knowing a fact will open up something in you and make it more available, but the facts themselves are not important. Every insight has a different fact in it—sometimes it’s your mother or father, sometimes it’s anger or hurt, sometimes happiness—these change. It is not the facts but the satisfaction that is the common element. Maybe the person who said, “The truth will set you free” knew this. So you went out looking for the truth. You knew facts were truth, but what the person had in mind was that particular inner certainty, that taste. If you go after the facts, the true facts, these will bring you to the taste of that satisfaction and freedom. It is not a moralistic thing that truth is good, and you will be rewarded if you are truthful. The certainty that comes with truth is itself a freedom, the freedom from doubt. 

Because the Holy Ideas are differentiated ways of viewing what is, they are conceptual and so are related to the higher intellectual center. To understand them on an experiential level is to open the head center. The perspective of the Holy Ideas that we are going to be working with is the view of reality that arises when the head center is open, active, and functioning. When this center is closed, one’s perspective on reality is filtered through the nine delusions of the fixations. Getting a taste of how reality objectively looks confronts the delusions in a systematic way. Each delusion is a very specific and deep belief about oneself and reality, crystallized into a conviction, which is incorrect in a specific way. So our work with the ennea-types is not a matter of going into the details of how each one operates, but rather of seeing how their cores are the result of basic delusions about reality, which can be corrected through truly understanding and perceiving the corresponding Holy Idea.

So the sense of being present, the focused attention, the caring for the task, and the caring for the interaction with the people around you, are all fundamental to living according to the truth. Otherwise, we’re just cleaning windows in a room full of people. Without the attention to the truth there’s no value in the action; we’re not getting anything and we’re not giving anything. But if we do our tasks in a genuine way, we will feel that we’re getting something and giving something at the same time. And that real thing that is both getting and giving is the actual living itself, the actual living presence in that situation. The living presence is where the value is, where the true taste of life is. The work we do here involves both realizing the truth of reality and living according to that truth. The time we spend learning to function with presence fine-tunes our consciousness. We learn the value of our realization by living the life of our realization, and in time our actions will embody our awake attention. It is our way of stabilizing and establishing our realization. We can live our lives with a clear and strong sense of presence. We learn to strengthen our spine not only by understanding what is true but also by acting in a genuine way. We perform our tasks even though we are aware of feeling inadequate and lonely. We practice attention in presence while we work, focusing our attention primarily on the tasks. Even though we are aware of our emotions and issues, we don’t waste our energy analyzing them. If we are aware of our inner state without blocking it in any way, our presence will continue transforming.

Where did everybody get the idea that love is sweet and soft? Where did that come from? The idea is derived from somewhere. Some universal truth—a fundamental reality that underlies everyone’s experience—is influencing our ideas of love. We have felt it, we have experienced love in a way that actually felt soft and sweet. And at some point in our life, when the veils are rent and we feel naked to love, when we fall in love, humans get a taste of love beyond the word itself and the nice feeling, or the friendly gesture that comes with it, or the hug that conveys “I love you.” We actually taste the sweetness. We feel ourselves melting. We feel the softness. Our bodies actually become a feeling of softness, as if something were welling up from inside and giving us a feeling that love is there. You know when you are feeling loving and you know when you are not, and you know the difference because you feel it. Love is a state. It is an experience that arises within your consciousness, and it has the feeling of softness. It can be like liquid sweetness flowing through your veins, infusing every cell, and pumping you with a liquid that feels nourishing and sweet. Babies feel the sweetness and softness of love before they ever have the idea of love. They are the love. That is how you originally knew it, and deep inside, you never forget it. It is in your flesh and bones. 

The more we drop our attachments and abandon our inner idols, the more we are filled with grief and loss and sadness. The whole universe will turn into an ocean of tears. As our heart empties itself of its idols, it sacrifices too its yearning and its longing, and even its love. You don’t feel you long anymore. You don’t even feel that you love anymore. There remains only the direct condition of being consumed by an ocean of hot tears. This is some taste of nearness of the Guest, but we experience it for a long time as the grief over the loss of all the things we are shedding and sacrificing. We willingly sacrifice everything, but we cannot help but feel such deep sadness and tears. However, this again is another story the mind tells us, trying to explain something it does not and cannot comprehend. The mind cannot see that it is the Secret drawing nearer and beginning to melt us, to dissolve us. We can say that it is the heart passionately longing for and loving the Secret. But we can also say it is the Secret touching you, completely and passionately burning you up. For a long time you do your work from the outside, by seeing the distractions and letting them go. As that happens, it is as if the Secret, as if the Guest, is coming closer. The nearness of the Secret is not like the closeness of any other lover you’ve ever experienced. The Secret will burn you up from within, will incinerate you. It will boil you to total evaporation through passionate heat.  

We are considering the moments, however rare they are, when we feel as if there is somehow more of us partaking of the experience. We want to understand what “more of us” means. More of what? What is the element that gives our experience this taste of presence? We are also aware that some individuals have greater presence than others. We say, “He has more presence,” or “He's an imposing presence.” But can we say what is really being referred to here? We are not referring to the quality of presence of mind, which is greater awareness. “Presence” itself is more than that. Presence also can be sensed at times of intense and deep emotion, when a person is fully feeling an emotional state, not controlling or inhibiting it, when he is involved wholeheartedly in the feeling, totally immersed in it in a free and spontaneous way without judgment or holding back. This usually happens only when the person feels totally justified in feeling the emotions. For example, an individual might experience a great loss, like the death of a loved one, and so feels justified in feeling the grief and the sadness. He might get so involved in the sadness, so immersed in it, that the feeling deepens as if it were miles deep, going to greater depths and profundity. This state might become so deep and profound that it feels thicker and denser as he gets more deeply immersed in it, so deep and profound that he experiences himself permeated by a kind of presence. It is as if the profundity and the depth are an actual presence, palpable and quite clearly there.

When you know yourself, when you realize your true identity, the meaning of life does not come to you in the form of a conceptual answer to a question. It is not an answer in your mind. It is you. The presence, fullness, and intrinsic preciousness is directly experienced; it is not in reference to anything else. It is complete autonomy; only the experience itself can give a taste of this satisfaction. This experience of self-realization is the answer, in the sense that it ends the drive. It is true absence of seeking.

The Absolute dimension is considered by the various spiritual traditions to be the deepest possible realization; when one does have a taste of such truth there is certainty of its absoluteness. There cannot be anything beyond the Absolute, because if there is any perception or experience then by definition it is within consciousness, and the Absolute is precisely the transcendence of consciousness. It is the Father of Christianity, the Divine Essence of the Sufis, the Parabrahaman of Hinduism, and the Nirvana of Buddhism. Sri Aurobindo, wrote of his experience of the Absolute, which he termed nirvana:

It threw me suddenly into a condition above and without thought,

unstained by any mental or vital movement; there was no ego, no real

world—only when one looked through the immobile senses, something

perceived or born upon its sheer silence a world of empty forms,

materialized shadows without true substance. There was no One or many

even, only just absolutely That featureless, relationless, sheer,

indescribable, unthinkable, absolute, yet supremely real and solely real. .

. . What it (this experience) brought was an indescribable Peace, a

stupendous silence, an infinity of release and freedom. [Satprem, Sri

Aurobindo or The Adventure of Consciousness, pp. 151–152]

The Absolute is sometimes referred to as emptiness or void, and this is so. However this does not truly describe this mystery, for although it has the nature of voidness it is also nonconceptual, and hence beyond the concept of void. It is in fact more real than physical reality, more solid and substantial than anything else.

What will be left if consciousness goes? For consciousness to go, beingness and existence also must dissolve. There needs to be absolute nonexistence, absolute darkness, darkness so dark that you don’t know it is dark. The moment you know it is dark, consciousness has already arisen, the big bang has started, the word has been uttered. To realize the truest, absolute, utmost nature of who we are, and of all of reality, we have to let go of consciousness. That is the night. The night never changes. The night never comes, never goes. The night is not born. The night will never die. When we glimpse this truth, we see that however obvious have been the notions that your mother was your mother and your father was your father, thinking through concepts has actually separated you from your truest nature, the nature that was never born. We have to confront many assumptions in the mind before we can really get a taste of the Guest. The realm of the night is like deep sleep. When you wake up, you are completely refreshed. Creation begins all over again, the whole universe arises. Only when all sensations cease, when there are no more sensations, no more consciousness, do we really know who we are. Then we know the absolute truth. As the night, we perceive the whole of existence, the totality of the daytime realm, as nothing but thoughts that arise in the night. 

Even the annihilation space is experienced, and hence there is a boundary. In other words, it is an individual experience. The annihilation is still related to oneself. The sense of individual experience remains, in a very subtle sense, as the annihilation of self. The experience is still self-centered, self-related. The annihilation happens to somebody, to oneself. The dissolution of this subtle boundary of individual experience leads to a yet deeper and more open space, an utterly empty space. This space is complete and total emptiness. It is the emptiness which eliminates separating boundaries. There is no more a sense of individual experience. There is nobody there experiencing the emptiness. At this level, there is no difference between awareness and emptiness. Again, this space cannot be conceived by the mind. The mind cannot conceive of experience which is not an individual experience. According to the mind, experience always belongs to someone, to a self, to an individual. Only the taste of this experience can give an understanding of this space. In this space, experience is completely open. There is freedom without the notion of freedom.  

So in the experience of presence, what is present is essence, our true nature, which is independent of conditioning. Presence and essence are the same. We have discussed presence to give a taste of what essence is. As we see, essence is the part of us that is the experience of “I am.” Essence is the direct experience of existence. Of course, essence can be experienced as other things, such as love, truth, peace, and the like. But the sense of existence is its most basic characteristic. It is the clearest, most definitive aspect that sets it apart from other categories of experience. Essence is, and that is what is most basic to its experience. This experience of “I am,” of direct apprehension of existence, is not a mental or emotional experience and cannot be understood from the perspective of the usual categories of experience. The mind can think about existence, but it cannot reach it. We have seen this in discussing presence. The answer to the question: “What is essence?” is “what is in us that can experience ‘I am.’” Essence is the only thing in us that is directly aware of its own existence. Awareness of its existence is an intrinsic quality of essence.

Early in the journey, something could fulfill you for a short while, such as a love affair, an exotic dish, a vacation, a new outfit. You could feel happy for a while because you don’t recognize yet that whatever it is is a veil. You think it is the Beloved. But when you recognize it as a veil, then you will not be content with it. Finally, when you have a taste of what it is like to be with the Beloved, all the other veils won’t work as well. You won’t be able to lie to yourself, cheat yourself. Every time a veil arises, you will feel slightly disconnected because you’ll know it is only a momentary distraction, and it won’t really satisfy you. You won’t really feel the contentment, the peace, the feeling of, “Oh, yes, I am here. Right now, I don’t have to think or be concerned about anything.” So as you see, it is a whole process with subtleties, changes, and variations. This is the process of the work.

Before we can truly say that we are spiritual, we have to recognize that spirit is paramount and the world is only the experiential locus where the experience of spiritual realization can happen. Without this dimension of realization, the world is not only a place of suffering, it is a forsaken world. It is an empty world. It doesn’t truly have nourishment, only the illusion of nourishment. This is one important reason why our inquiry needs to be open and not oriented toward any goal set by the mind, for our mind is oriented toward achieving what the world promises. More than anything else, the seduction of the temptations of the world is what limits our openness. If we knew what is possible for us as human beings, if we just had a little taste of what it is like to behold the Guidance, we wouldn’t squander one minute of our life pursuing the promises of the world. The sense we get when we feel the presence of the Guidance is not only wonderful, not only a blessing; it feels right, it feels as if that is what is supposed to happen. We start to recognize our human birthright. We begin to understand what we are here for—why this world exists, why we are alive. 

Reality is not only our nature, it is what is there all of the time. It is what is there that makes us see the reflection. What we see is there, but it is a reflection. And if you see that it is a reflection, it will be penetrated by the freshness of the innocent reality, and the whole thing will look much lighter, much more brilliant, cool, and refreshing. Everything you see, you will see with the eyes of the newly born awareness. You’ve never known it. You look at the table and do not know it is a table; you have not yet known that there are such things as tables. You look at people, you do not even start to ask questions, you are just dumbfounded, struck with awe. I’m saying all this to give a little hint of the kind of depth our inquiry can reach, to give a taste of what it is we are really doing. This gives us a sense of where we are going so that we do not delude ourselves with believing that we know where we are going, and we do not delude ourselves in pursuing things that we already know, that we already have planned and mapped. This is the true function of knowledge. True knowledge is not an accumulation. When true knowledge arises, it might answer your questions, but at the same time it will open up a thousand others. Understanding is a continual process of opening up more and more questions. When you have absolute knowledge, it is one huge, infinite question. You do not know something; you are just staring at reality.  

Living according to the truth requires courage, boldness, and a willingness to sacrifice. We’re sacrificing what is false in us. In the beginning, it will appear as if we were sacrificing our security, safety, and comfort, sacrificing the possibilities of pleasure and love. But these seem small sacrifices once we have a taste of what it’s like to be real, once we have a taste of the satisfaction and freedom of really living as a human being. Our usual ego perspective is that satisfaction comes from having what we believe we should have. In my experience, it doesn’t work that way. I could have the whole world, but if I am not the person I can be, it doesn’t mean anything. Comfort or pleasure, a home, a mate, work: these are external ornaments for a real human being. They are not life itself, not the stuff of life. They are the husk of life, the package, at best the manifest expression of life. The real substance of life is who and what we are. We tend to get lost in the container, in the packaging, in the things our eyes can see. We forget that if we live from that perspective, we are bound to be husks or shells ourselves. We are imprisoned in a fake world. When we take the packaging to be what is real, we’re going to be like the packaging. If we want our life to be real, to have true substance, we have to be a human being of substance. We have to put ourselves on the line. We have to live with courage, boldness, integrity, and self-respect. These qualities depend on our being honest and sincere.

When we allow ourselves to fully experience our wanting, and we trust that the wanting itself has the intelligence to reveal the pure energy of desire that underlies it, we get a taste of what it’s like to feel love and desire as a unified force. We experience both the feeling of love and the power that is in it. And we don’t even have to fall in love for that to happen. Falling in love is one condition that helps us to experience love and desire as a unified force, one of the main ways of experiencing divine eros. But the capacity to experience divine eros is a potential that lives in all of us, whether or not we are sharing love with another person. This loving desire, which is often first ignited by our human relationships, is a characteristic of all real love relationships, including our relationship to true nature. When we feel the desire to know our nature, we may not conceptualize that desire in those words. A flame is lit, and we experience the wish to know more, see more, be more, feel more. We want to become more consciously aware of what we internally sense to be our potential. We want to discover the depth and meaning in life and existence. As the presence of something beyond awakens in us, a desire to be close to that something also awakens; a wanting to find out about it arises. It might begin as an interest, but some sort of desire is present even in an intellectual interest. A little intellectual desire can open us up and become a draw toward experiencing what is beyond our conventional perspective. 

All the questions that arise at the beginning of the spiritual journey become more scintillating as we get a taste of what lies beyond and a taste of our spiritual being and its vastness, its magnificence, its beauty, its lightness, its unfettered nature. Each taste tends to inspire love and appreciation, to make more love available in every way; and the love grows and expands both inwardly and outwardly. The more we know about our nature, our spiritual nature, the more we love it, the more it draws us, pulls us. The more we feel the expansion of how we view our life, the more we feel, know, and are drawn by and to a more fundamental sense of reality. As our questions are answered, more questions come to replace them. The unknown grows as we come to know it. We love the known in our life—this world with all of its limitations and difficulties—but we also love this fascinating mystery that lies beyond our physical, earthly existence, that which is unlimited and completely outside of time and space. “Outside of time and space” doesn’t mean that time and space is a bubble that our nature somehow lies beyond and outside of, and this bubble somehow erupts into what lies beyond. What it means is that time and space is a bubble, and our nature pervades it. Time and space is the context in which our lives happen; it is where our relationships occur, where the many and varied individuals that we come in contact with and share life with are born. Our bodies appear within this context, emerge out of what seems to be a very mysterious process of growing and exploding into life within somebody’s belly. What a miraculous thing that is. But where do we come from before this time-space bubble becomes the home for our bodies? What happens before that, or after that, or even throughout it?