Reaching Higher Centers through Essence Presence

Reaching Higher Centers through Essence Presence

One of the practical areas for self-work is to develop essence. Being a member of a school provides the setting and backdrop for developing essence with like-minded people, a daily opportunity for sharing and interacting more deeply and genuinely. In the Fourth Way tradition, our Teacher emphasizes the essentiality of this line of effort.

What is essence and why is its development so crucial? Essence is what we were born with, our inborn abilities, our innate preferences, our natural inclinations, all of which are esoterically closer to our true Self than the hard façade called False Personality. False Personality is what develops over time as we mature from a child into an adult. This personality is tagged “false” because it is filled mostly by random experiences, parental and community programming, cultural norms, religious doctrine, and other things that don’t constitute a path to the true Self.

“Essence must transform itself into Presence in order to realize itself.” – The Teacher

Our true self is something beyond the normal realm of our machine, the four lower centers. Our Teacher has emphasized that there are several gateways or pathways to reaching the true self, one's Higher Centers. Essence is one such gateway if one is present to it. As students, we pursue activities that enrich us and feed our essence. Crafts, hobbies, intentionality, and fine cultural events are the types of things that feed essence. For example, my essence likes being outdoors in nature, so it behooves me to spend more time in nature.

“The noble-minded rely upon culture to gather friends and use these friends to sustain Virtue.” − Confucius

As I said above, essence is a part of the machine, so I need to be careful not to merely pursue essence rather than consciousness. Essence is prone to fascination and identification, too. The solution is to connect my efforts to being in essence with self-remembering or being present. This dyad of experience is one of the highest forms of existence we can pursue. The Teacher calls this combination of being in essence and being present, Essence Presence. It’s a direct path to the latent, but available Higher Centers. When we are present, we transcend our essence through essence presence to reveal Higher Centers, our true Self. We arrive home. We come full circle.

“This present teaching differs from many others by the fact that it affirms that the higher centers exist in man and are fully developed." – P.D. Ouspensky

Join the discussion

Self Portrait with Two Circles, Rembrandt