Well, it is not exactly like that. Being knows how to do things with grace, with beauty, with power, with effectiveness, with precision. However, Being does not know about how to fix a window. Your true self has nothing to do with windows; it does not know about windows. It does not know how to water plants. That is where your consciousness, your personality, comes in. But when you are watering plants, Being certainly knows how to do it the best way, in terms of the sense, of how to hold yourself, how much effort to exert, how to do things in such a way that you feel integrated within yourself. Being shows you how to manifest the beauty outside. There has to be a coordination and a working together, and ultimately a harmonization, a balance, because we are not just talking about a state of being; we are talking about living. That is the Work we have in our life. We are already beings. Before we are born, we are beings. The story then is how to bring this Being into living. That is the task we have in this life: to learn how to live on earth in physical bodies, do things and enjoy things that the inner being is usually not concerned with. In other words, how can essential Being manifest as a human being? What we are doing—the task of life—is developing Being into a human being. That is the stage of evolution we are engaged in. Being is already here; you come as Being. It is true that you forget, and you forget because you still learning how to bring this Being into life. However, in the case of conventional life, the necessary knowledge and guidance are absent, so a split develops. After the splitting occurs, a part of the consciousness goes on doing and living life, separate from Being. As a result, we need to regain access to our being, and then harmonize that being with living. Regaining of Being, which is enlightenment, is not the end; it is the beginning, which is how we started anyway. But we need to grow up, and learn how to be as mature human beings.

Doing the Work for yourself blocks your unfoldment. Doing the Work in order to become a clearer and clearer window for the universe is selfless; then you do the Work out of humility, out of love, and out of putting your self (your ego) aside. In this case, your unfoldment will happen more easily and spontaneously. It is not a matter of thinking that you, as a separate individual, are going to help God in this way; that is just a subtler way of expressing your sense of separateness. It is a matter of recognizing your true position relative to God, your true function as a human being, your true connection to the universe—which is being a cell in its body. Reorienting your approach to the Work does not mean you should try to control your motivation (which is impossible anyway), or judge yourself when you see that you are being self-centered. Rather, it means that every time you recognize yourself operating from selfish motivations, you try to identify the barrier that is interfering with seeing things objectively.

We can manifest as a person, or as love, joy, or compassion. The person is just one of the essential aspects. Being a person is the most difficult of the essential aspects to understand because we have lived an imitation of it which is the false person, the personality. In being a person, there is a true person, and the true person is what I call the Personal Essence, an expression or manifestation of your true nature. Just like love is an expression of who you are. But if we believe that ultimately we are the person, then we form a false personality. We form boundaries. So the person is not something to be rejected or put down or hated. The person is as precious as love is. The person is the way that who we truly are manifests on earth. Who we truly are cannot live on earth because we are nonphysical and have no form, so for true nature to have a window on creation, it manifests as a person. 

Understanding the property of life in the soul deepens and expands our appreciation of life for its own sake. We begin to recognize the intrinsic value of life, and especially the value of human life, for it is the life of the human soul, the soul with infinite potential. Appreciating and loving life is inseparable from loving and valuing the soul. We want our life to be full because it is the fullness of our soul that is our window onto the universe, our organ of experience. We not only want to be free and detached; we want to be free and detached and at the same time for our life to be full, rich, and fulfilled. And because we understand that consciousness is more fundamental than life, we realize that to be free we need to center ourselves in pure consciousness. We love pure consciousness because it is our very identity, truth, and substance, but we also love our living soul because she is what completes it. She is the daughter of primordial pure consciousness, but also its infinite potential.

This state of poverty and purity, this depth and level of work, require that we really want the truth as it is. We have to be intimately touched and moved by reality, by truth, by essence, to be able to even contemplate venturing into a condition like the poverty of spirit. For most people, it is not their concern. Moving into this realm is not part of ordinary life; it is only needed when we are moving deeply into the truth of reality. For those who are genuinely motivated, we need to realize that the poverty of spirit requires tremendous devotion and struggle. We must develop purity, nonattachment, understanding, love, and many other qualities, all the way to perfection, all the way to completion. Mystical poverty is the entrance into the Divine Essence, the window into the deepest mystery of reality, the absolute truth of Being. Only those with a powerful pull toward that most beautiful of all beloveds will dare to venture here. And of these, only those who love this Beloved to the extent of complete annihilation into its mystery chance upon this doorway. 

The beloved now claims the heart fully. It has taken full possession of it, as its own throne. The beloved is not an other, it is the true dweller of the heart, my source, my ultimate self, and the ultimate essence of everything. I am struck by the realization that in this experience I perceive the absolute for the first time in the heart, by the heart. The absolute is perceived inside the soul, by the soul. The heart reveals itself to be the abode of the absolute. More exactly, the heart is the window to the absolute. I have experienced the absolute many times before, almost continuously, but not in the heart, and not through the individual soul. A new feeling arises, a completely welcome feeling that expresses a deep realization. I feel I am finally arriving home. This mystery, this majesty, is my home, my original place. It is what my heart longs for and loves more than anything else. I realize I have always loved this mystery, and always longed to melt into it, even though I did not know consciously what I loved and longed for. I knew I loved the truth, but I was not aware that the truth is ultimately this inexplicable reality. I see that I have always felt exiled, that I have always been seeking to return home. As I recognize the home of the soul, I recognize the totality of her search and its true meaning.

So when you encounter a delusion, reality says, “In this moment, reality is appearing as a delusion.” And the delusion turns into a window, into another way of experiencing reality and enlightenment. Each of you is a big window, but this  window, you will notice, has a frame around it. The fourth turning of the wheel removes the frame. Every time a frame is removed, reality exposes another way that it can be. That is what I mean by saying that by challenging positions and beliefs in our view of understanding reality, we allow other possibilities to emerge—new possibilities and also familiar possibilities seen anew. All the qualities and dimensions of being that we have explored can become more accessible and gain a different meaning and a different kind of utility as we behold them from this more total view.  

Exactly. When the body is relaxed and balanced and has no tension, there are no boundaries. Boundaries are tensions in the body. The experience of boundaries goes along with tensions in the body. The body armor is the boundary. When the body is balanced, relaxed, there is no need for boundaries. So you could say that some self-realization can be done physically. In the end, self-realization is the completely relaxed body, nothing else. When the body is completely relaxed, it is a window to the universe. That window allows the possibility of perception, awareness and experience. When the body goes, the window is gone, which is a further development, a greater opening. It does not mean that the window is closed; it means that the whole universe becomes the window. Then there is nothing to see. And each transition brings a deeper peace. Each time there is a loss of self or self-identity there is a deeper peace. Peace and stillness. Until you get to the complete absence; then peace is absolute because there is absolutely nothing to disturb it. Absolutely nothing, not even the knowing that there is peace. The moment that you know there is peace, there is a little disturbance someplace because there is self-reflection. But absolute peace means that there is absolute peace without the awareness that there is peace. Complete unification, no reflection. And when the peace is absolute, the clarity is absolute. When there is absence, there is absolute clarity. Clarity is everywhere and everything.

So, our world is our knowledge. The world we live in is what we think we know. That brings us to the question: What does it mean to know? What is knowledge? What do we know and what don’t we know? When we want to do the Work, when we want spiritual experience or spiritual insight, we tend to believe that spiritual work is an inward work. You look inside: Essence, spirit, Being, God, is inside you. This is true, but only in the lower levels of the Work. In the beginning, you have to look within, but finally, you have to look within not because the truth is inside you, but because the window that opens you to the truth is inside. The organ of perception through which we can see the truth is within. Your own soul, your consciousness, is the organ of truth, the window to reality, and that’s why you look inside. This does not mean that the truth of reality is inside; but for a long time the way we experience it is through the reality that’s inside. We tend to believe that that’s how things are—that essence is inside, spirit is inside, truth is inside. At some point, we need to begin to see things more objectively. We need to question our assumptions about inside and outside. We need to wake up at a more fundamental level. We need to stop running after the illusion that truth is inside, and start waking up to the objective truth that is everywhere.