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AT THE HEART OF MOST OF our human activity is the search for meaning. We look for it explicitly in all sorts of places, from tiny, invisible particles to grand, transcendent states. The point of the search is to find a place to rest, an ultimate truth that can bear the weight of the entirety of our human experiences. Our sciences chase elusive supersymmetrical particles in the hope of finding a unified theory of everything. Our spiritual traditions travel the inner realms looking for the final dimension of reality. Our philosophies investigate being and nothingness for master concepts with maximum explanatory power. And each of us mirrors this impulse for finality in our daily calibrations of who we are and what we are all about. We can even see our conflicts—be they personal, intellectual, political, religious, or cultural—as a clash of competing ultimates. Looking for the one thing that will make sense of all things often has the paradoxical effect of obliterating the particularity of each thing. Unity becomes a matter of sameness and equality a matter of equivalence. We want to get either to the bottom of everything—say, the Higgs boson—or beyond everything—the absolute emptiness of reality. But life happens across a broad scale of things: quarks, Aunt Cathy, the Pacific Ocean, a traffic jam, boundless awareness. The impulse to subsume this multiplicity into a single, fixed, and overriding unity—whether quantum, macro, or both—springs from our need for stability, for knowing once and for all, for shoring ourselves up against insecurity. In our inner life much as in our outer, we tend to trade freedom for security. In Runaway Realization, A. H. Almaas, the founder of the Diamond Approach to inner realization, presents another possibility. What if reality is not limited to any single ultimate? What if there is no fixed truth that unifies all human life?
search for an ending is a vestige of subtle concepts of the self? What if unity includes particularity? What if freedom means never coming to a final rest? Almaas introduces us here to the view of totality, a view that holds all possible views as valid without limiting reality to any one of them. Rather than holding fast to any one ultimate truth, the view of totality recognizes that no single view or combination of views can exhaust the richness of reality. The view of totality includes all possible views—the dual, the nondual, the unilocal, the theistic, the scientific, the philosophic, and others—without reducing them to mere iterations of a single truth (as do the perennial philosophers). Although each view is a complete understanding of its own particular truth, none of them is a complete understanding of all of reality because reality is inherently free and cannot be fully captured in any view.
At its core is a radically new conception of identity and difference, one that is not relative but absolute—meaning that unity does not come at the expense of particularity, or infinity at the expense of the finite. The view of totality is…
Because it recognizes the validity of all views, each with its own ultimate, the view of totality does away with the notion of any single, conclusive truth. Reality remains ever beyond the reach of any one totalizing view, reflecting the fact that all views contain certain truths about reality. Runaway realization is the triumph of reality living its life, freely moving from one realization to another.
Freedom becomes a matter not
of arriving at some ultimate truth, but of being able to be nimble in view, to hold any view or multiple views or even no view at all. This underlying openness of view—to hold any or many, one or none—is at once the essence of the dynamism that animates all possible views of reality. In this view of totality, Almaas extends Gödel’s famous mathematical proof into the realm of spiritual work: No view or combination of views, no matter how consistent, can completely exhaust the truth of reality. The price of human freedom, then, is to live this uncertainty.
His previous books articulate what can be considered a hierarchical view of realization, where spiritual practice is a gradual process of seeing through ego identifications, realizing various qualities of presence and levels of nonduality, and integrating these realizations into our daily life. In this book, there is no refutation of the Diamond Approach as we have known it—a steady progression of experiencing essential qualities, boundless dimensions, and wisdom vehicles—but rather it is seen anew from the enlarged perspective of nonhierarchy.
From the vantage of totality, we can discern not only the distinctness, the validity, and the experiential universe of that particular view but also the relationship of one worldview to another. Doing so unleashes the inherent freedom of reality, and reality shows its delight by leading us to other views and further mysteries. This is the upshot of uncertainty: We are loosed from the search for final meaning into a life of limitless adventure.
THE TURNINGS OF THE WHEEL
Reality itself begins to live our life in all its daily expressions. Our life can become an endless revelation of reality, an adventure with neither beginning nor end. This book that you find in your hands is my attempt to point out the endlessness of reality, the unceasing revelations of the adventure of being. Like life, the teaching that I communicate, the Diamond Approach, is a living truth that constantly evolves and reveals more about itself and more about reality.
AI Summary
Runaway Realization by A.H. Almaas 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.
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