Source Text
EDITOR’S PREFACE Have you ever found yourself in a situation where a sweetness arising in your heart catches you by surprise? In this form of heart awakening I am thinking of, the felt sense is strong enough to loosen the grip of the mind and its persistent train of thought. A warm glow expands in your chest as your heart opens. Your consciousness seems to relax and soften. There is a profound shift in how you view the world and yourself. Edges become less pronounced, a smile creeps onto your face, and a palpable goodness seems to permeate you and your surroundings.
These tend to be fleeting moments, which seem to reflect some kind of magical transformation of reality into a warm and welcoming, sweet and tender world. A world where we feel held, where we can relax without worry, and where we can be the essence of who we are in an easy way.
By individual soul I mean our individual consciousness—that which forms our subjectivity and is the carrier and site of all of our experiences and perceptions. It is consciousness located in space and time.
When we’re dealing with the boundless dimensions, we are discovering different ways of experiencing reality as a whole, not just our experience of ourselves. There’s a shift of focus from the experience of the individual soul to the experience of the wholeness of existence.
To understand the nature of everything is to understand what the supreme being is, to understand the nature of God or the universal spirit. And when I use the terms “God,” “divine being,” or “supreme being” here, I don’t mean an entity that lives in some heaven, that creates things in time and sends emissaries to reward or punish us or anything like that. If we think of it in that way, we’re still looking from the viewpoint of the individual soul.
So why do we call this love divine and think of it as a boundless dimension? In one sense, it’s divine because it’s not the kind of love that you feel person to person, toward somebody else; this nondual love transcends the subject/object dichotomy. But the notion of divinity isn’t because it is related to something called God. It’s the quality of the love itself that gives it divinity, the quality of consciousness in it. There’s a human quality of consciousness and there’s an animal quality, but there’s also a divine quality.
But with God, well, there is no “yours.” There is only this presence, this reality, this truth that is here. Experience belongs to nobody; it is as it is.
This is something we tend not to be aware of; we take it for granted that experience is always owned by an experiencer. And that is why it’s difficult for people to understand divine being.
Because we’re not aware that our true nature is this boundless omnipresent effulgence of pure love and light, when we have something we like, we become attached to it. We become possessive. If there is somebody you love, you’re attached
Any object you love, you become attached to. So what is attachment? It’s a substitute for divine love. Attachment is a way of trying to get the feeling that I am one with this: I have it now, it’s mine, and it can’t leave me. If you recognize the dimension of Divine Love, you know that you and the object are all one thing, so you don’t need to hold on to it. But since you don’t know consciously that it’s all one thing (you only know it unconsciously), you believe you are a separate thing that can have something else. And so we develop attachments. We’re bound to develop attachments; it’s our way to preserve the closeness and connection.
AI Summary
Nondual Love by A. H. Almaas and Ram Dass presents key insights from the Diamond Approach tradition. The 10 passages above capture the essential teachings.
Core Themes:
- [To be expanded]
Key Passages: Highlights 1, 3, and 10 are particularly representative.
This entry was generated from Readwise highlights. Expand with additional context as appropriate.