Realization and liberation require many things: dedication and commitment, love and devotion, awareness and sensitivity. But more than anything else, they require understanding. Understanding is the central faculty needed for liberation, especially when we go very deep in our experience and arrive at subtle places. That is because when we reach the subtlety of our true nature—the real depth—what is left is our understanding. Everything else, in some sense, has dropped away by then. All that is left is our subtle capacity for discriminating what is manifesting, what is true, and what is false. – Brilliancy: The Essence of Intelligence, ch. 5
Realization and liberation require many things: dedication and commitment, love and devotion, awareness and sensitivity. But more than anything else, they require understanding. Understanding is the central faculty needed for liberation, especially when we go very deep in our experience and arrive at subtle places. That is because when we reach the subtlety of our true nature—the real depth—what is left is our understanding. Everything else, in some sense, has dropped away by then. All that is left is our subtle capacity for discriminating what is manifesting, what is true, and what is false. – Brilliancy: The Essence of Intelligence, ch. 5
Understanding is a development which also brings loss. The moment you understand the state you have, you lose it. Because of this, many people aren’t attracted to the path of understanding. They like devotional methods and other such practices, because in them you get to develop love or compassion and keep it. You might be always feeling loving, but not know consciously what love is, what it does. When you understand love, you understand that losing it doesn’t mean you don’t experience it any more, but rather that love will arise in your experience only if your environment needs it. For example, the experience of compassion or love is not something I feel all the time. But if I’m working with someone and that person needs love, I experience love. If the person doesn’t need love, I don’t experience love, I experience something else. That’s what it means for a state to become a station. It means you completely own that state. And it becomes like anything else that’s really yours. You don’t have to feel it all the time, because you know it is there whenever you need it. – Diamond Heart Book Three: Being and the Meaning of Life, Ch. 11
Understanding is like a prism. If you have pure light passing through a prism, you have different colors. They are creativity and beauty, they are the forms of light. That is the life. Without the prism, it is just light by itself, with no differentiation. You don’t see anything. But through understanding, you come in time to understand the whole thing, the whole process. Nothing needs to be done; you just see. That’s understanding, that’s life, that’s reality, that’s the unknowable. You know the whole thing, not just one part.
We can see how each sector of the personality relates to one of the colors of the prism. Our method—the Diamond Approach—allows us to see this connection. One sector is connected to the red, one to the green, one to the yellow, and so on. By seeing the connections you start experiencing the colors, the aspects of Essence, which are not only color, but pure light as well. – Diamond Heart Book Three: Being and the Meaning of Life, Ch. 11
When you’re understanding something, can you actually understand something fundamental about your personality without the presence of Essence? Can there be a clear awareness of what is there without the presence of Essence? In fact, the awareness itself is Essence; the clarity, the objectivity itself is Essence. As we have seen the mind itself can’t go all the way in understanding. Essence must be present to infuse it with the necessary quality. – Diamond Heart Book Three: Being and the Meaning of Life, Ch. 12