The personal essence, the Pearl Beyond Price, however, is a development; it is something that develops out of the Soul when its center is the true self in this life. It is your actualization of your beingness here. When you experience yourself as your beingness, as your personal essence, you feel that you’ve accomplished yourself—not just yourself in the sense of knowing who you truly are, but by knowing who you truly are you start growing and developing your potential. This is the personal essence—personal, with a sense of beingness. The essential self is the experience of “I”; the personal essence is “I am”—not only my identity and my sense of who I am, but myself as a person, here in the world. That being has many skills and capacities, plus wisdom, understanding, and a certain style of life. The true self can be seen as the source, as the inner God, and the personal essence can be seen as the product or the Son of God. In Christian terminology the true self is the Holy Spirit, and the pearl is the Son. The true self is beyond time and space, but the personal essence is in time and space as embodied Being. They’re two parts of an identity that fit together. – Diamond Heart Book Three: Being and the Meaning of Life, ch. 5
The Personal Essence has four primary characteristics: autonomy, beingness, personalness and contact. Investigating these characteristics will allow us to contrast the Personal Essence with the personality of the ego and also with the impersonal essence or Being. In the process of essential development, exploring these four characteristics can precipitate the experience of personal Being. As our case histories will show (and as is discussed at length in our book The Void), these characteristics usually announce themselves to one’s consciousness through an acute feeling of their absence or lack in one’s sense of self or in one’s personal life. By following the thread of the quality that one feels is missing, given the right circumstances and the right guidance, one comes to experience the missing element, and then to recognize it as a characteristic of one’s sense of Being. – The Pearl Beyond Price: Integration of Personality into Being, An Object Relations Approach, ch. 2
The qualities of the Personal Essence are those of fullness, autonomy, competence, respect, dignity, integrity, excellence, maturity, harmony and completeness, among others. There is very little knowledge and guidance in the modern world about how to develop into such a true human being. The result is that most of us settle for an imitation or an incomplete development, which is the personality of ego.
Understanding that ego is a reflection, or an imitation, of a true reality makes it possible to connect to this reality. One need not go the usual spiritual route of abandoning one’s personal life and the values of that life, but rather one must look deeply into those values and explore the true reality that they are approximating. Most people are not willing to abandon their personal life for a spiritual quest, not merely because of attachment to ego, but because they sense a truth in the values and aspirations of personal life. For such people, the overwhelming majority of humankind, understanding the reality underneath ego is a more accessible means of spiritual development than the traditional methods striving after impersonal reality. This is not only because in this method they do not have to abandon their personal lives and aspirations, but also because this path reveals the deeper values and truths of those aspirations and strivings toward actualization. – The Pearl Beyond Price: Integration of Personality into Being, An Object Relations Approach, Ch. 1
The presence of the Personal Essence allows the ego boundaries to melt and dissolve. Then one feels oneself as a full presence and a spaciousness. One is both the fullness and the openness. So instead of the contracting boundaries around one’s personal presence, one feels the openness, spaciousness, lightness and clarity of Space. The experience of the Personal Essence without boundaries is nothing but the experience of one’s personal presence in clear and empty space. One suddenly feels so much room, so much space, so much clarity, all around one. This is not even exact; one feels one is both the presence and the Space. There is no sense of boundaries, no sense of separateness. One is a boundless spaciousness, continuous with a fullness of presence.
What a delight, what a joy and a lightness, is this personal presence without heaviness. One feels in direct open contact with everything, without barriers between one’s presence and the rest of the universe. – The Pearl Beyond Price: Integration of Personality into Being, An Object Relations Approach, Ch. 33
According to our understanding, the condition of the objective Personal Essence is one that includes the personality, for it is one of the dimensions of reality. It is true that it is now refined and developed and can be completely absorbed into Being, but it is still available in experience. It is transformed more and more into the experience of the aspect of the Soul, the individual consciousness that had been structured as the ego individuality, and is now experiencing its nature as Essence. In other words, the personality is still experienced, but perceived as the superficial part of oneself. Its refinement knows no end. – The Pearl Beyond Price: Integration of Personality into Being, An Object Relations Approach, Ch. 39
The Personal Essence has no inadequacy because it is directly connected to, and hence completely supported by, the Cosmic Loving Presence. Ego boundaries leave the ego individuality without the inner support of the various aspects of Essence, and without the comprehensive support of the Cosmic Essence (Consciousness). So just as we saw before that ego inadequacy is due to a mistaken sense of self, now we see that it is also due to the presence of ego boundaries. Both intrapsychic self-structures, the sense of identity and the sense of separateness, although indispensable to ego existence, are the reasons for its deep and basic inadequacy. Inadequacy is the deep nature of ego, due to the mere presence of its structure. – A. H. Almaas, The Pearl Beyond Price: Integration of Personality into Being, An Object Relations Approach, Ch. 36