Edited excerpt from an interview with Faisal Muqaddam by Bo Heimann.
Essential Nature
In the Diamond Logos Teachings, essential nature is not understood as an idea, an ideal, or a spiritual image of who we should become. It is the living reality of our true nature — directly felt, sensed, and known through the soul and the body.
Faisal Muqaddam describes essential nature as a real being made of many qualities: love, joy, clarity, strength, warmth, freedom, vitality, and many other dimensions of Essence. These qualities are not merely emotional states. They have presence, texture, density, color, and function. They are the living elements through which Being becomes available to human experience.
Essence is not an ideal to imitate. It is a living quality of true nature that can be directly experienced.
Many spiritual teachings speak of true nature as simple, undifferentiated, or absolute. Faisal does not deny this ground. But he emphasizes that true nature also differentiates itself into distinct essential qualities. The basic nature may be compared to an ocean, but from that ocean arise countless forms of living presence — qualities that nourish, support, clarify, strengthen, soften, and mature the soul.
Some essential qualities bring groundedness and confidence. Others bring strength, vitality, tenderness, clarity, sweetness, or joy. Each quality provides something specific to the human being. Each one supports a different capacity of the soul.
The Differentiation of Essence
For Faisal, Essence is not vague spiritual energy. It is precise. Each quality has its own presence, flavor, and effect. Some qualities may be delicate and subtle. Others may feel dense, solid, brilliant, or powerful. The work of Essence involves learning to recognize these qualities not as concepts, but as immediate dimensions of experience.
This precision is central to Diamond Logos. Rather than saying only “be loving,” “be clear,” or “be strong,” the work asks: What is love as an essential quality? What is clarity? What is strength? Where and how are they sensed? What obscures them? How does the personality attempt to imitate or replace them?
Each essential quality gives the soul a particular capacity: strength, tenderness, clarity, joy, groundedness, or love.
Through inquiry, sensing, and presence, the student begins to discover that Essence is not abstract. It can be felt as a living substance of Being. It affects the body, the heart, the mind, and the way one relates to life.
The Unique Soul
The interview then turns toward a central theme in Faisal’s work: the uniqueness of the soul.
Many spiritual paths describe the individual as a drop returning to the ocean. Faisal offers a more differentiated view. While the human being is not separate from the ground of Being, the soul is also unique. There is a personal dimension of consciousness that does not simply disappear into the Absolute.
This unique soul is not the false personality. It is not the ego identity built through defense, image, or conditioning. It is a real individuality — a particular soul, with its own presence, meaning, and unfolding. In Faisal’s language, realization does not destroy this uniqueness. Rather, realization allows the soul to mature, clarify, and shine more fully.
Realization does not erase the soul’s uniqueness. It reveals a deeper individuality grounded in Being.
This distinction is important. The limitations of the mind, the identifications of personality, and the defensive structures of ego can dissolve or reorganize through the work. But the essential individuality of the soul is not something to be eliminated. It is part of the mystery and dignity of human life.
Ego as a Memory of the Essential Self
Faisal’s understanding of ego is not simply negative. He does not present ego as an enemy to be attacked or destroyed. Instead, he asks a more precise question: where does ego come from, and what is it trying to preserve?
From this perspective, ego contains a distorted memory of the essential self. The young child begins as a living being, an individual soul. Through the pressures of environment, relationship, misunderstanding, and loss, the child gradually becomes separated from essential qualities. Love, joy, clarity, strength, and freedom may become obscured or defended against.
As this separation deepens, the soul attempts to remember who it is. When direct contact with essential identity is lost, the personality begins to hold images, feelings, and strategies that try to preserve a sense of self. Ego forms around this loss. It becomes a structure of memory, defense, imitation, and longing.
The ego is not merely a problem. It is also a trace of the soul’s longing to find its way back.
This does not mean that ego is the true self. It means that ego often develops around the absence of the true self. It carries the ache of separation and the attempt to recover what has been lost. In this sense, even narcissistic structures or self-images may conceal a deeper longing for the essential identity of the soul.
The Search for the Self
Faisal points out that many people believe they are seeking the Absolute, God, enlightenment, or liberation. Yet underneath many of these movements is a more intimate longing: the longing to feel whole, real, recognized, and connected to the deeper self.
The Absolute is our ground. It is home. But the soul also longs to know its own essential individuality within that ground. The ego, in its distorted way, is often searching for this. It is not looking only for emptiness or transcendence. It is searching for the lost sense of essential identity.
The work, then, is not to kill the ego, nor to indulge it. The work is to understand what the ego is organized around. When the personality is explored with presence and precision, the missing essential quality can begin to reveal itself. What was held as image, defense, or longing may open into a more direct contact with Essence.
The movement is not from ego to self-image, but from ego’s longing toward essential identity.
Returning to Essence
Essential nature and ego are therefore deeply connected in the Diamond Logos understanding. Ego is not the truth of who we are, but it often points toward what has been lost, hidden, or forgotten. The very places where the personality is most defended may also protect a trace of Essence.
Through inquiry, the student learns to listen to these structures without hatred and without naïveté. The personality is understood, not worshipped. It is softened, clarified, and gradually reorganized in relation to Being.
What returns is not a spiritual idea of the self, but a more immediate recognition of essential nature: the living qualities of Being, the uniqueness of the soul, and the possibility of becoming more fully human through realization.
Full Interview
This edited article is based on a longer interview with Faisal Muqaddam. The full original version remains available as archival source material for readers who wish to follow the conversation in greater detail.