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To truly appreciate the view of totality, one needs to also be acquainted with some of my previous books. Reading The Unfolding Now or The Inner Journey Home would provide such preparation.
I go over some of the realizations and transformations necessary for such unexpected openness. Second, I discuss some of what becomes possible when such openness is available—illuminations and understandings of enlightenment that seem esoteric only when looked at from the perspective of nondual realization.
This third thread reveals in a direct way how all the complexity and richness of the spiritual journey expresses kinds of simplicity that are difficult to appreciate because of how ordinary they seem to the inexperienced traveler. This book does not exhaust the matter, but discusses some of its highlights.
We find ourselves playing hide-and-seek with the purity that is at the heart of all reality and all spiritual transformation. This wily true nature is neither hidden nor can it be caught. Our experience of it is unmistakable—whether as awareness, love, truth, or consciousness—and yet we cannot say finally what it is. It pervades everything and yet is nothing in particular. This true nature appears in many ways, and even though each form of true nature is all of it, true nature can never be exhausted.
Taking up where he left off in Runaway Realization, A. H. Almaas explores what it is that makes anything and everything and nothing happen: the central element, the spiritual prima materia, the true nature of experience and reality.
Most obvious is its expression in the individual consciousness as what Almaas calls “red sulfur,” an unstoppable quickening that becomes the fuel for runaway realization, where realization lives through revealing further awakenings and mysteries of reality. This inner combustion—different from and rarer than any particular realization—orients the individual consciousness toward greater opening, toward manifesting more of what it means to be human.
Probing the paradoxes of true nature reveals more questions than answers. We can know directly in our experience its dynamism, its purity, its tremendous liberating force, but can we know exactly what it is? Is true nature anything apart from the forms it takes? How can it be the central element of everything and yet nothing in particular? How can it be the agent of all change and also what it is that changes? Is it the source of everything or is it everything? Is it me or is it my nature? Our sincere love to know what is true can lead us not to final answers but to freedom from our usual habits of mind, to a kind of openness with discernment and a kind of readiness without motivation. We can encounter a reality innocent of our usual assumptions and preferences and postures, a reality innocent of us. In this simple openness, reality becomes free to manifest any possibility. The philosophers’ stone can so polish our minds and hearts and bodies that we are free no matter what we are experiencing. We can be as free staring at our smartphone as we are free swimming in emptiness. Our experience of true nature can become so total, our love and interest so absolute, that the idea—and even the experience—of true nature can fall away altogether, leaving an ordinary simplicity, a freedom without condition, including that of true nature itself.
Our sincere love to know what is true can lead us not to final answers but to freedom from our usual habits of mind, to a kind of openness with discernment and a kind of readiness without motivation. We can encounter a reality innocent of our usual assumptions and preferences and postures, a reality innocent of us. In this simple openness, reality becomes free to manifest any possibility. The philosophers’ stone can so polish our minds and hearts and bodies that we are free no matter what we are experiencing.
Our experience of true nature can become so total, our love and interest so absolute, that the idea—and even the experience—of true nature can fall away altogether, leaving an ordinary simplicity, a freedom without condition, including that of true nature itself.
TRUE NATURE, the fundamental nature of what we are—and of everything—is what matters most when it comes to spiritual transformation. It is the single most important element for liberation. The more we understand it, the more we realize that it is not simply the most important element; in fact, it is the only element because it is inherent to all the other elements that are necessary along the way. True nature, when we experientially and sufficiently understand it, is every single thing—every event, every place, all and everything. And all and everything does not have to be sublime; it can be ordinary and still it is true nature. However, it seems that to be able to accept this simplicity and to live a normal life with this kind of freedom, we most often have to go through a spiritual journey. We have to go through the various stages, the deaths and rebirths, the discoveries and awakenings, the enlightenments and illuminations. We have to experience all the subtleties and mysteries of reality. The teaching stream from which this book is written, the Diamond Approach, contains both this kind of hierarchical view of the spiritual journey, with progressive stages of experience and realization, and also a nonhierarchical view of reality, which expresses the singleness of true nature.
AI Summary
The Alchemy of Freedom 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.
This entry was generated from Readwise highlights. Expand with additional context as appropriate.