AS HAS BEEN WRITTEN A THOUSAND times, the ultimate nature of essential reality cannot be communicated in words. However, this reality manifests in pure essential forms of consciousness and experience, in what we call the “aspects” of essence, such as love, strength, peace, compassion, awareness—to name only a few. The experience of these aspects is completely palpable and subject to keen and precise discrimination. It is this fact that allows the verbal descriptions and analyses that this book undertakes.
The concept of essence is found in some spiritual traditions, such as Sufism and some schools of Buddhism, though the word “essence” is not always used. In more common usage, “essence” means that aspect of something most true, real, or substantial. It is the essence of something that makes it what it is. In the course of this book, our usage will become increasingly clear, and in fact we will ultimately see that the “spiritual” and “common” understanding converge in a deeper, more subtle and yet simpler way than it is at first possible to appreciate.
Beginning to understand essence means beginning to see through our illusions. This book describes the way many things are mistaken for essence in spiritual and psychological work. This book also describes the loss of essential qualities, and the subsequent separation from true being, that occurs during individual ego development—thus shedding light on the whole story of personal suffering that has sprung out of the illusory reality of the individual ego identity. The lives of most people involve a constant effort to “prop up,” defend, promote and improve this identity, whose status as a mental construct is never challenged. Thus the liberation and joy of knowing our true identity is lost, unless the desire for a deeper or truer experience of being is allowed to manifest, and we have an opportunity to search effectively for the truth about ourselves.
This book introduces a method for the retrieval and development of essence, so that it can function as a transformative agent in the process of self-realization. In the course of this movement toward realization, the stabilized manifestation of the qualities of essence leads to a surprising and unusual resolution of an age-old dichotomy, an unexpected redemption of the personal life: the realization of the “pearl beyond price,” described in Chapter Five, constitutes a resolution of the apparent conflict between the life of the “man of the world” and that of the “man of the spirit.”