As the boundless dimensions emerge, they take the soul nearer to the transcendent state of true nature, with each succeeding dimension a little nearer to the primordial simplicity, each one a little simpler, with fewer qualities and features. Divine love is manifest true nature with the quality of love, true nature as heart. Love is a differentiated, recognizable quality, a discriminated quality of Being. The next dimension to emerge is simpler; it arises through the transcendence of the quality of love. We have already seen that love is the source of affective qualities. This gives us a hint of what the next dimension will be like. We refer to it as pure being, or pure presence. Divine love, like all qualities of essence, is being or presence; and all these qualities are definitely pure and undefiled. Here, however, purity is not simply the absence of defilement; it is the absence of differentiated qualities. Pure presence is presence with no qualities, with no discernible color, affect, or taste. It is simply being, with nothing added.  The Inner Journey Home, pg. 292

Pure Presence

In the realization of pure presence, the soul understands presence in its most pure and simple state. She finds it to be so simple that she cannot say anything else other than that it is presence, or beingness. Presence here is without qualities, devoid of recognizable characteristics such as love, compassion, truth, joy, and so on. It is presence, and that is all, no more and no less. Since her true nature here is simply presence, it is devoid of opaqueness. From this perspective it becomes clear that the manifestation of a quality or color adds something to true nature; it adds a slight opaqueness. Even when there is color the medium of presence can be transparent, but with color it is not as transparent as when it is colorless. When there is color, or quality, one sees the color, or feels the quality, in addition to simply being aware of presence. Hence one’s awareness is slightly divided between the sense of presence and the color or quality. It is not exactly a division, for in essential realization the presence and the quality are inseparable, but the mind can still discern two things, on two ontological levels. They are coemergent and coextensive, but the presence and its quality or color can be discriminated. In pure being, there is no possibility for this discernment, for it is no longer a matter of coemergence. It is singleness, simple unity. This simplicity means total transparency, complete colorlessness. The medium is completely see- through; there is nothing to obstruct the awareness. There is not even any quality for the awareness to reflect on and recognize. It is presence, however, with the sense of the fullness of beingness. The Inner Journey Home, pg. 292

Unity and Oneness of Being

Experiencing oneself as the immediacy of pure presence, or as the expanse that is the inner nature of everything, we experience the state we call “unity.” It is the experience of true nature as if from the inside, from its own side, and not from the side of manifest forms. We see that it is an indivisible expanse, a single medium with no inner distinctions, similar to the empty sky. The other kind of experience, that of oneness, is experiencing pure presence from the vantage point of the manifest forms. We experience ourselves as the oneness of all these forms, that all the forms constitute one Reality, whose nature is pure presence. We are aware of pure presence as the constituting ground of everything, but we are not in the midst of the expanse of true nature, but in the midst of the surface of manifestation. In unity, the forms are still visible, but barely, appearing as distant surface phenomena. True nature almost completely outshines the manifest forms. In oneness, true nature and the manifest forms are both strongly present, as two sides of the same Reality. Both unity and oneness are nondual conditions. The Inner Journey Home, pg. 301

Now and Eternity

When we experience ourselves as a form in the now, as when the soul experiences herself as the offspring of Being, we experience ourselves not as now, but as eternity. As an inseparable form of pure presence we are aware of the changes all around us, but because we are constituted by pure presence, time passes us, but does not touch us. We are eternity itself. Experientially, eternity is the state we experience when we are aware of the passage of time, but feel untouched by it. Timelessness, on the other hand, is the transcendence of time. There is no awareness of time at all, for there is no differentiation, and hence no change. Therefore, time is in the midst of now, but eternity is in the midst of time. But time passes neither on now nor on eternity. Time passes in the now, and by eternity, for eternity is the offspring of the now. The Inner Journey Home, pg. 303

Being and Nothing

Fullness of Being and nothingness of space are two inseparable sides of the same presence, of the same perception and sensation. Each side may dominate experience, depending on the particulars of experience. Sometimes we feel ourselves as the boundless truth in its full beingness; at those times, we feel the whole world as the fullness of Being, real and substantial. We are the solid ground of everything, the true existence of all forms and appearances. At other times, we feel light and empty, like a boundless nothingness. Everything is nothing, where the nothing is what truly is. Nothing has any substance or sense of existence; all forms appear as empty appearances, like a mirage reflected in the clarity of nothingness. We feel like nothing, totally light and empty. But it is a wonderful emptiness, for it is a lightness and delight, a freedom and release. There is no heaviness or depression of any kind, not even the weighty fullness of presence. We are lighter than light, emptier than space, a nothing that is the ground of all things. Sensing ourselves, there is nothing to find, just a lightness and an infinite openness. At the same time by remaining with this nothingness we realize it is also fullness, beingness, and presence. The Inner Journey Home, pg. 305

Origin of Knowing

Since there is no differentiation in pure presence, its knowing is the first knowing, the origin of cognition. We see that the origin of cognition is the experience of being, or more precisely, the dimension of pure presence. Knowing begins with being, which is the knowing of being. It becomes clear to us in the realization of the dimension of pure presence that the origin of the cognitive capacity of mind is the knowing of Being. This means that knowing begins as immediacy of experience, a directness of consciousness with a discrimination of the condition of consciousness. Knowing begins as completely inseparable from what is known. Even more, knowing begins with the nondifferentiation of known, knower, and knowledge. Furthermore, knowing begins with the knowing of Being, where Being is known, knower, and knowledge. The timeless truth here is that fundamentally the knower is Being, the known is Being, and the knowledge is Being. We see of course that as cognitive differentiation develops and expands, knowing tends to develop in the direction of discrimination so completely that what is discriminated is experienced as not only discriminated but separate; ultimately this separateness develops to such an extent that knower, known, and knowledge become three distinct things. The Inner Journey Home, pg. 309

Noetic Form

On the dimension of pure presence, all forms can be discriminated, recognized, cognized, known. In other words, all forms are cognitive forms. However, they are knowable not discursively but directly, as manifestations of basic knowledge. We can know anything and everything here, given opportunity and true capacity, but we can know them directly, immediately, intimately. Because of this we call them noetic forms, referring to the nous of direct knowing. On the dimension of pure presence, manifestation consists of noetic forms, forms capable of precise and sharp discriminating knowing. We can know any form, whether it is a star, a planet, a rock, an animal, an organ of the body, a molecule, an atom, a feeling, a state, a thought, directly and sharply for what it is. If it manifests we can know it. We can know it exactly and objectively, with specific details and minute discriminations. We can know it because it is fundamentally a noetic form, because it is fundamentally knowable. It is fundamentally knowable because knowing is a fundamental dimension of the ground true nature and any form is a manifestation that participates in this dimension. The Inner Journey Home, pg. 314