Essence is your essence, the nature of your soul. In time, the more your experience and understanding of it deepen, you recognize that it is not just your essence, but the essence of everything. Deeper still, you see that it is not only the essence of everything, but that Essence is the only thing that is actually present; there is nothing but Essence, in other words. Then you recognize that the Holy Ideas are ultimately qualities of Essence or Being. – Facets of Unity, ch. 17
If you know the colors of the prism, it’s easier. The next step is to know light with no color, which is the unknowable. That’s our approach. First you know the aspects of Essence, and then you know they are Being, they are light. But, you’re still looking at the color. You see the prism itself, and you see that understanding is the prism that’s creating all these colors. Then it is possible to see the actual beingness of the colors, of the aspects. You see compassion, for instance, as Being, and you say, “I am compassion, I am love.” But, if you just say “I am,” if you look at the “I am” quality of the aspect without looking at the compassion quality, that is the unknowable. Of course, you could say, “Oh, it’s clear, or it’s yellow or pink,” and it would be a correct perception from a certain level. However, if you go deep into the actual nature, the essence of Essence, it is pure light with no color. It is light before its differentiation into the spectrum. And what do you say about that? It’s light. What do you see? You could say it’s nothing, because you don’t see anything. For you to see something, it must have a reflection. But, the moment it has a reflection, it has a color—the color of its reflection. But what is the color of the light? In fact, you can’t say anything, but you know it has to be there. – Diamond Heart Book Three: Being and the Meaning of Life, ch.11
Essence doesn’t belong to you. You do not have your essence. It is a mistake if you think you are going to get “your” essence. “I’m going to do my session and get another part of my essence.” Nobody has an essence. There is only one Essence. You might become aware of it: It is as if one part of your body experiences Essence, and another part of your body doesn’t experience Essence. What would you say? Would you say, “I should keep it in my left leg? I shouldn’t let my heart have it? I should have more and more Essence in my leg.” The moment you see that Essence is part of your body, don’t you naturally want to experience it everywhere? The leg doesn’t say, “It is mine. I shouldn’t share it with the arms and the head.” The natural thing is for it to be everywhere. In reality, it is the same thing. You do not experience your essence just for you. Self-realization is not for yourself alone. Self-realization is for everyone and everything, because it is not just yours. It is inaccurate to say that it is your essence, you are going to have your essence, it is your life, and you are going to have only your life, so you will use this essence to make your life nice. Your life is connected with everyone else’s life. There is only one Being, and our lives are the life of that Being. When you look at things from this perspective, it is natural to be loving. It is natural to be helpful and generous, because the other person is actually you, is very much a part of you, is as much you as you are you, not one iota less. – Diamond Heart Book Four: Indestructible Innocence, ch.6
These three aspects, Space, Personal Essence and Essential Self, are the most central aspects of Essence. In the process of inner realization they, in some sense, replace the self-image, the separate individuality of ego and the sense of self of ego, respectively. Most traditional spiritual teachings can be grouped according to which of these three aspects they emphasize. Buddhism emphasizes Space, the prophetic tradition emphasizes the Personal Essence, and most of the Hindu systems emphasize the Essential Self, which they term the “atman.” – The Pearl Beyond Price: Integration of Personality into Being, An Object Relations Approach, Ch. 24
Essence is always pure, eternally immaculate, everlastingly perfect. This is the reason why many wisdom traditions speak of realization as recognizing the inherent perfection of Reality. Our true nature is primordially pure, complete; it does not need to develop or be clarified. This can lead, and has led, to much confusion about the inner journey, whether it is the discovery of a primordial perfection or the process of perfection. This also resulted in the conceptual dichotomy of gradual and sudden paths of enlightenment.
Understanding soul and essence, and the relation between them, clarifies such confusion. Soul grows and develops. She does this by actualizing her potential. The central potential she needs to actualize is her essence. Realizing her essential nature she is enlightened. Her essence is her deepest and most central potential, but it is a particular potential, one of the elements that constitute her potential. Essence does not have potential, for it is the ground of all potential, the ultimate nature. Realizing essence we recognize we are primordially and fundamentally immaculate and complete. The soul develops, and her spiritual development is the actualization and realization of essence. But in the state of self-realization, development does not make sense, for we are then essence, which is perfection and completeness itself. – The Inner Journey Home: Soul’s Realization of the Unity of Reality, Ch. 5
It is true that essence is a substance, but it is not an inert substance. It is a substance that in itself is life, awareness, existence. Take clear water, for example. Imagine that this water is self-aware, that each molecule is aware of itself and of its own energy and excitation. Imagine now that you are this aware substance, the water. This is close to an experience of essential substance. Of course, this is hard to imagine for someone who does not know essence. And the essential experience is much more than this. Essence is not alive; it is aliveness. It is not aware; it is awareness. It does not have the quality of existence; it is existence. It is not loving; it is love. It is not joyful; it is joy. It is not true; it is truth. – Essence with the Elixir of Enlightenment: The Diamond Approach to Inner Realization, Ch. 2
Your essence is very intelligent, very generous. It has a way of throwing a conflict in front of you so that by looking at that conflict, you’ll find out something you need to know. The situation that you are given is perfect in terms of timing, place, the people involved, your capacities, the capacities of the people around you, every detail. The situation is such that if you actually try to understand it, you’ll understand something about your essence. The situation is not there to give you a hard time. You’ll have a hard time if you look only at the manifestation, seeing the conflict itself as a difficulty. If you look at it from the perspective of ego, of identification, you’ll suffer and continue to suffer. But if you see that you fell on your face and you’re suffering because you tripped over something that was in your way, then you’ll want to find out more about what that was, more about that barrier. – A. H. Almaas, Diamond Heart Book One: Elements of the Real in Man, Ch. 1
When I first became aware of presence, I felt a sense of fullness, aliveness, and groundedness. At that time, it was simply presence for me. That was the most I could differentiate: Essence is presence. That’s what I was aware of, and nobody had told me anything else before that; I had never read anywhere that presence could appear in different ways. So Essence, I found out, was presence—a fullness, an aliveness, a thereness, an I-am-ness. After a while, I would feel the experience of the presence changing. It’s true that it was presence, but once in a while it felt somehow different. One day the presence would feel strong and firm, while the next day it would perhaps feel soft, sweet, and melty. That was the beginning of discrimination.
And the recognition of what that difference meant brought the jolt of insight: “Oh, Essence appears in aspects.” That was the brilliant breakthrough. It was a big surprise for me, quite an eye-opener. This became a basic tenet of the Diamond Approach: Essence is not just presence but presence that presents itself in various qualities, various flavors. I could have stayed with just that, with the insight that presence appears in aspects. The exploration continued, however. At some point, I realized not only that presence has qualities and aspects, but that these arise at certain times and seem to challenge particular ego manifestations and deal with specific issues. – A. H. Almaas, Spacecruiser Inquiry: True Guidance for the Inner Journey, Ch. 27