The courage of the Red latifa is what we need in all these situations. This willingness to feel our fear and continue our inquiry appears as a natural resilience—nothing strange or unusual, just a natural sense of how we can experience ourselves. This strength that we feel in our hearts infuses the soul with a boldness that allows her to be open to seeing things she has never seen before—even things she considers to be threatening or terrifying. From this perspective, you can see that self-realization or spiritual maturity is not for the squeamish, and not for the dilettante. You need to be serious about the journey in the sense of being willing to risk your life for it. If you’re going to complain or retreat every time something difficult happens to you along the way, then you are interested in something else; you’re not a true spiritual inquirer. The path of inquiry is a path of challenge and adventure always leading us into the unknown. Such is the fullness of the Red Essence that it arises in many flavors to support the openness of our inquiry: strength, energy, expansion, and the capacities to discriminate and confront our experience as we discover what is true. When this fullness of flavors fills our heart, it gives us the courage to welcome whatever the adventure of life brings us. – Spacecruiser Inquiry
So there is a very intimate relationship between discrimination and strength. To be able to separate, I need to be strong. But separation is based on discrimination. Hence, if I’m not strong enough, I won’t be able to discriminate. I won’t be able to—and I won’t want to—know how I am different from you. Then there will be no separation. More often than not, we tend to be mushy and undifferentiated in our experience—relating to it with vagueness and in generalities. We cannot tell one thing from another. When there is no precision, it means there is no clarity, and then it’s not possible to know the truth for what it is. This brings us back to the function of the Red latifa. The Strength Essence is useful for inquiry in giving us the strength to begin to discriminate. The more active the Red Essence, the more powerful, precise, and real our capacity for discrimination becomes. The more we discriminate, the more we separate from our reactions and self-images, and the more we know ourselves for who we are, which lets us open up to true nature. Discrimination is the very heart of inquiry, the heart of the revelation of truth. So now we see the interconnections between inquiry, the Diamond Guidance, and the Red Essence. We understand how the Red latifa functions in the Guidance and thereby supports our inquiry. – Spacecruiser Inquiry
Essence manifests as many elements, many aspects, but it also manifests on many dimensions or levels of those aspects. For example, when you experience the Strength Essence—the Red Essence—you can experience it on many levels of refinement, subtlety, or depth. At the beginning of essential revelation, it’s just the Red Essence. You feel the redness, the heat, and the strength, but your understanding and knowledge of the aspect is not precise. Your understanding can still be influenced by your conventional knowledge—by your reactions and beliefs. However, in another dimension of Essence, the experience of the aspect itself and the comprehension of what it is are inseparable. In this dimension, the experience of the Red Essence and the understanding of what it is arise as the same experience, so our comprehension is free of the influence of our mental concepts, free from the conventional dimension of experience. The insight about the Red Essence is now protected by the new level of manifestation of the aspect. This means that as the Red Essence arises, there is inherent in the very experience of it an exact understanding of what it is. This kind of knowledge is not available in the conventional dimension; it is not conventional wisdom. In some sense it is a magical property, because there is no rational explanation for it. So this knowledge of the Red Essence does not arise from our storehouse of acquired knowledge, it arises independent of our mind. It is real knowledge, authentic knowledge, because you didn’t get it from someone or something or arrive at it through logical analysis or deduction. It is a direct knowingness, a new basic knowledge. It’s an insight that comes from the very depths of the Red Essence itself. The Red Essence is stating what it is. Not, of course, through one word, one sentence, or one insight, but through an entire gestalt of understanding. – Spacecruiser Inquiry
On the diamond level, we don’t experience the Red Essence in the usual way, as a red fullness, flow, or fire. If it occurred in this way, our knowledge of the Red Essence would be susceptible to our conventional mind, to our beliefs and reactions. Instead we experience a red diamond, a faceted ruby. There is a precision in the experience of a red diamond, an exactness and definiteness. These characteristics simply reflect the fact that we are experiencing the aspect in such a way that its meaning is inseparable from the direct experience of it. We know precisely what the Red Essence is because we are experiencing the Red diamond, which is experience and knowledge as one. So, without the diamond level of experience, there would be no possibility of precise knowing, and hence of Diamond Guidance. – Spacecruiser Inquiry