Clarification

Each time you understand an issue or an identification with a past conflict or a now-unnecessary defense, you discharge feelings associated with the issue and work through the feelings and the beliefs about it. As you have seen many times, working through an issue – which involves ceasing to be identified with it – typically allows the arising of an essential state. In this process of working through an issue related to any essential quality, the personality confronts the part of its structure that substitutes and compensates for the lack of that true quality. For example, issues around essential strength will uncover the false strength of the personality. When this compensation is seen through and the essential strength is freed, there is no more need for the personality structure of the false strength. (Diamond Heart Book 4, pg 6)

When the issues are clarified, it is easier to become aware of the movement itself, of the wheels in motion – not of what is being churned but of the actual churning itself. When you become aware that you are the machine in action you are completely convinced that the activity itself is what is churning up problems, only then is it possible for the wheels to stop… When the activity stops, you recognize that most of your thoughts and desires and efforts are resistance and what you have been resisting is the present moment, the now. (Diamond Heart Book 4, pg 11)

This process of clarification – which is the clarification of the soul – is the development of the Personal Essence, what we call the Pearl Beyond Price. The development of the Pearl is a process which keeps moving towards further clarification until it becomes the Supreme Personal Essence. Each essential state has become personalized as the personality has become clarified, as each essential aspect has become you. You yourself become the personal essential reality, and thus, this reality can be integrated at the level of the Pearl. When you experience Compassion, that Compassion becomes you. “I, personally, am Compassion. I am Value, I am Truth”. When you own it, it is no longer you experiencing it, but you know you are it. (Diamond Heart Book 4, pg 13)

Personality and soul

The thing that we experience as personality at the beginning, and for a long time on the path is actually nothing but the soul. The personality is our soul, but our soul imprinted and shaped by past experience. Our past experience shapes and forms our experience of ourselves and of our conscious and dynamic soul, and obscures its true nature by remaining as residual content in our true nature. These residues are the self-images, the internalized object relations, the reactions, the suppressed feelings, memories, and the many defenses we use to protect ourselves. The process of clarification is basically the dissolution of these residues through the light of understanding. This way the personality reveals itself as the soul developing towards individuation. The soul develops into the Supreme Pearl Beyond Price, which is the individuation of Being. This is the embodiment of Being. (Diamond Heart Book 4, pg 18)