Thus, I found myself in a group of eight participants with two leaders, Hameed Ali and Karen Johnson. The “Process,” as they called it, involved three months of very intensive psychological work. I wrote my autobiography from different perspectives, I contacted my repressed rage and pain, I relived many childhood experiences, and I began to make peace between my emotional child and my rational intellect.
Yet he consistently responded to who I was, not my fears, my shame, or my avoidance. When I tested him by hiding behind concepts, he drew me out, sometimes gently and sometimes with a challenge. When I faded into the background or into the pseudosafety of my fantasies, he confronted me.
He was interested not only in the experience itself but in the background of our experience, its medium and texture. The important question was, so what? How was I holding onto (or rejecting) my experience? Was it touching me? How was I letting it into my life and living it?
At its deepest, it was the sense of having been held by an all-fulfilling reality and then being thrown into a world of struggle and aloneness. With all these layers activated, there was a huge amount of loss and anger tied to what might have been a simple career decision.
As I stayed with these experiences, I came to a place that I can only describe as beyond coming and going. I saw that my mother’s life had been precious but that what she really was, her true nature and source, was never born and could never die. I still missed the person she was, but the sadness had turned to tenderness and my guilt had unfolded into gratitude. I also realized, not only as a mental insight or an emotional feeling, but in my bones, that my life, too, was an expression of that same dimension beyond separation, birth, death, or any other concepts. I needed to make my choices about my job, but these choices evaporated in the face of the immensity and clarity of pure awareness. I felt aware of being transparent to Being as it was moving through me. My job choice, and indeed all my choices, were no longer problems to be solved; they were purely the flow of Being through my life.
All the world and all experience seemed made of pure, clear crystal. I felt the preciousness of our fragility and vulnerability as human beings. I realized there was nowhere else to go except to abide in the present moment. And then the sense of “I” evaporated into the emptiness, and all that was left was pure crystalline awareness.
As I reflect back over twenty-four years in the Diamond Approach, I notice that I feel more at home in my life and the world. Most of the time, there is a curiosity about my experience and a confidence that I have what I need to live my life to its fullest.
At the same time, I feel no separation or alienation from the world around me. All of these contents of my awareness feel as if they are just different shapes or textures of the same medium.
THE AIM OF THE DIAMOND APPROACH is to live fully and deeply. It offers the understanding and the practices to support a life without unnecessary struggle and difficulty, a life characterized by fulfillment and contentment.
If we let ourselves be open to our feelings in this moment, we begin to recognize a longing for such a way of being. For some of us, the longing feels like an ache or a sadness just below the surface of our usual awareness and concerns, a background so common that we fail to take notice. For others of us, it may feel like a gripping desire to gain and hold on to these qualities, an intense drive in which we set our sights on some distant spiritual paradise. Still others of us may adopt a frustrated resignation in which we devalue these qualities as an impossible or even undesirable fiction. Perhaps the most common response of all is a kind of numbness in which we sleepwalk through our days, not even considering our deeper thirst. We then delude ourselves into believing that crude counterfeits of fulfillment, love, joy, and wisdom are the real thing.
When we are cut off from our natural strength, our energy and passion are less available. The sense of expansive vitality escapes us, and we feel weak. To make up for this, we push too hard or strain to capture that passion. We try to convince the world and ourselves that we are not as weak as we feel. Bitterness or hostility flavors our activities and relationships. We then mistake this fake strength for the real thing, and we are caught on a merry-go-round of proving ourselves. The harder we try to prove our strength, the more we reinforce our weakness. Instead of an openhearted compassion, curiosity, and willingness to engage suffering without running away, we find a compulsive need to criticize, and then fix, ourselves and others in order to take away their pain and protect ourselves. We mistake false compassion for genuine compassion and wonder why we never feel really healed and whole. And so it goes; we dream of relief and fulfillment but settle for shallow and unsatisfying substitutes for real life.
Hurt is not simply a block to genuine compassion. It is also the access to compassion. Anger or the desire to inflict hurt is not just a shallow and frustrating substitute for authentic strength.
Our beliefs about ourselves and the world constrict our experience and become solidified into fixed (and fixated) patterns of feelings and reactions. These patterns give our lives a defensive or compulsive texture. Even our understanding of self-realization becomes a projection of these images, beliefs, and patterns. Our usual attempts to free ourselves, based on these patterns, only bind us tighter.
The Diamond Approach brings about a transformation beyond these images, beliefs, and fixated patterns toward our deeper nature. It means penetrating the false images and patterns and grounding our lives in an unrelenting love for our lives as they are: painful, ecstatic, or fulfilled. Spiritual realization is not merely a linear projection of a life based from the past to the future. It requires a new foundation that is grounded in the present. The Diamond Approach provides not only an understanding of this foundation but ways to move toward it that are appropriate and powerful. Encountering our lives in this moment, as they are, we begin to respond from the perspective of truth, openness, and trust. We relax into difficulties and unavoidable struggles, with an experiential knowledge that we can live our lives fully. We discover we do not need to avoid or fall asleep to our situations. We become present and awake. Each moment that we are able to experience our lives more fully and with less censorship, we become more open, spontaneous, natural, fluid, and responsive. Our distress unfolds into a confidence and an appreciation that is without judgment or hesitation. There is a joyful curiosity and a generous, unassuming calm at our center. We discover our capacities to be strong as well as still, tender as well as clear, accepting as well as persevering, relaxed as well as fully awake to this moment and its movement. And through it all, we come to abide in a basic trust in the compassionate intelligence of the unfoldment of our lives. Everyday life becomes the arena for this work. The defensive, constricting patterns are both the locks and the keys to the qualities of our true nature. The present moment is revealed as both the path and the fulfillment.
the primary method in the Diamond Approach is exploring and understanding immediate experience. If this exploration is deep enough and sincere enough, it will lead to spiritual awakening, development, and eventually, liberation.
When we experience a block deeply, it leads to that which the block was covering. This brings a painful experience of deficient emptiness, followed by a sense of presence and the direct experience of Essence. These psychological issues stimulate our growth in a way similar to the grain of sand that serves as the seed for a pearl.
However, these issues are not only barriers; they also guide us toward the truths underlying them. The Diamond Approach provides us with a precise means of understanding and resolving such issues, revealing them as both obstacles and doorways to self-realization. The goal of the Diamond Approach is the full development and realization of Being expressing itself in and through an individual human life. It posits no particular end state or experience. Its goal is not necessarily love, wisdom, power, will, action, bliss, peace, or emptiness. All of these are intrinsic to human potential and do arise as part of the path of the Diamond Approach.
The result is the free unfoldment of a living reality without constrictions or distortions.
The soul is the individual consciousness or medium of experience. It is not a fixed entity (as the concept is sometimes understood) but a pattern flow of consciousness. The soul is shaped and influenced by all experience, and it may be structured by the conditioning of the ego (or personality) or by its true nature, Being. In a sense, it is the
soul that makes the journey of awakening from conditioned and constricted patterns to the realization of its true nature. The true nature of a person, as it arises in the soul, is referred to as Essence. Essence is the pure, unconditioned nature of who we are. As the foundation for our everyday experiences as well as our sublime spiritual high points, it is always present, though usually hidden from our consciousness. Essence can be experienced in many different aspects and dimensions. It is not just one big, generic “spirit” but a whole world of qualities that can be discriminated in a precise way. When we first awaken to it, we may be struck or touched by a sense of presence, as if what we experience is real in a way that is beyond our minds. Essence is the truth within the forms and experiences of our lives. The work of the soul is to open, clarify, and purify itself in order to experience Essence more directly, more completely, and with fewer obscurations or blocks. Essence is then experienced as open, clear, and pure. When this same true nature is recognized as the true nature of everything, it is referred to as Being.
Diamond Dimensions In another realm, which Ali calls the Diamond dimensions, Being is revealed through its universal qualities. The seven Diamond dimensions are Objective Understanding, Pleasure, Conscience or Action, Knowledge, Love, Will, and Humanness.
For example, in the personal realm, the experience of Essential Love is deeper and more authentic than the usual experience of love based on mental constructs and emotional needs. In the universal realm or Diamond dimensions, love feels present in an unconditional way, pure and clear. The heart feels universal. Furthermore, we not only feel authentic love, we know it in a clear, insightful, and objective way, we find pleasure in it, and we discover that it brings with it the necessary support to manifest it.
The Call, the Path, and the Realization The desire for freedom, liberation, enlightenment, self-realization, inner development, or whatever it is called is not a response to a call from outside you. It is not that you hear of enlightenment, and then you want to be enlightened. It is not embarking on the journey because others, people you know, are on it. It is not a fad. It is not a desire for self-improvement. It is not an attempt to be some kind of an ideal model you have in your mind. It is not doing something according to some beliefs and opinions you have picked up someplace, recently or in the far past. The search is a very personal concern, an intimately personal interest in your situation. It is a response to a call deep within you. The call at the beginning is a vague, almost imperceptible and mysterious flame. It shows itself as a questioning of the disharmony you live in. It is your disharmony, as you experience it. It is your own questioning. And it is your personal yearning. If you want to be enlightened or realized like somebody else who you heard was able to attain enlightenment, then the search is not yours yet. It is somebody else’s, Buddha’s or Mohammed’s. The stirring must come from you, from your depths. The questioning must be of your situation, your mind, not of some system that somebody else has set up. You can use the system to help you, but ultimately it is your life, your mind, your
Enlightenment cannot be according to any system. It has to resolve and clarify your own situation. The realization must satisfy and fulfill your heart, not the standards of some system. The liberation must be of you, you personally. The path is you, your mind and your heart. The call is your call, relevant to your life, and it speaks intimately to you. The call, the path, and the realization are all a very intimately personal concern. Everything else is not yours, and you cannot use it for yourself or for others. But the complete resolution of your personal situation is yours, and that you can use for others, too. The quest does not bring about improvement or perfection. It brings about a maturity, a humanity, and a wisdom.
The purpose of the Work, however, is not primarily to eliminate suffering. The desire to return to one’s true nature is an innate impulse, which is there in the presence or even in the absence of suffering. The more we are in touch with ourselves, the more we feel this innate desire to know and to be who we really are. We want the freedom to live as we’re supposed to live, to fulfill all our potential. When we don’t, we suffer, but that suffering, rather than being a problem that the Work aims to solve, is simply a hunger for our true selves to live, to be free; it is a signal that we want to return to our true nature.
But now we understand that we cannot use our will if the will is being blocked and repressed. And we know that the will gets blocked and repressed for certain specific reasons. Our work in this group has shown us that one of the many causes of the repression of the will is the fear of feeling castrated. This unconscious fear is well known and commonly documented in the psychoanalytic literature, though its connection with the will is generally not seen. So, the moment we try to use our will, we begin to experience a terrible fear, the fear of castration, be it sexual castration, or the castration of one’s self, one’s energy, one’s will. We don’t even know this fear is there. We only know that this will is not available, that we cannot act with determination, cannot do difficult things.
It’s not that we don’t want to use our will, it’s that we don’t know how to, we can’t. It’s not available to us, due to repression. It has been cut off because of certain specific unconscious fears; and because these fears are unconscious, the conscious mind has no control over them, so when you push against them, they get stronger. It’s like rubber—when you push against it, it doesn’t give in but pushes back at you.
To the unconscious, surrender means loss, giving up part of yourself, disintegration—terrible things.
The most basic cause of our suffering is not emotional conflict. We have emotional conflict because we don’t have the knowledge of our true nature. In psychology, emotional conflicts are seen as the cause of suffering. What is generally not seen is that these conflicts in childhood have the effect of, or take the form of, alienation from the essential parts of ourselves, which are the source of our happiness and joy and fulfillment.
The Diamond Approach is different from these approaches in that it works on the perception and dissolution of the false personality simultaneously with the perception and development of Essential states.
Chapter 2 The Method Of Inquiry
During the practice of Inquiry, remember to sense your body, breathe, and stay aware of the present moment. It is important to hold your experiences with a compassionate, spacious, and nonjudgmental attitude. The practice of meditation is a strong support for this orientation. For this reason, students of the Diamond Approach are encouraged to practice meditation techniques, including concentration, mindfulness, and certain visualizations, as foundations for the practice of Inquiry. Inquiry generally leads to a shift in experience. This shift may feel like an insight, a release of energy, a strong (or subtle) emotional state, or a spaciousness in your awareness. However, these kinds of shifts are not its aim, and they are not final. Instead, they may open you to a deeper experience of Essence or to a deeper issue that needs to be understood.
At first, Inquiry is a technique, then a practice, and finally a way of being.
If you are working on a tendency to be judgmental and critical, take notice of the specific ways you do this. (Be careful, of course, not to suppress your feelings about suppressing your feelings or to judge yourself for being judgmental.)
INQUIRY AND ESSENCE The various Essential qualities and dimensions of Being are closely tied to Inquiry. For example, the Essential aspect of Strength provides the passion and drive to pursue your experience. Essential Will provides support and perseverance. Awareness provides clarity and open-mindedness. Compassion provides healing and openheartedness when dealing with deep and difficult experiences. Essential aspects provide specific foundations for Inquiry.
For example, exploring your personal issues of hurt in a particular situation may bring out Essential Compassion on a personal level, experienced as tenderness and care. As you continue to inquire, the experience may deepen into the experience of compassion on a more universal level. With further Inquiry, this compassion may lead beyond itself to an unconditional Divine Love and trust, pure presence, or emptiness. None of these deeper experiences negate the sense of compassion; rather, they give a sense of completing it.
Of course, the process of understanding can go deeper. You might wonder, “What’s this big deal about people liking me? Why do I want people to like me? I always wanted to be a jerk because I thought then people would like me. Now I discover that they don’t necessarily like me that way at all, so I’ll immediately try to find a new way to behave so that they will.” You decide that the best way to do this is to become self-realized. So, why do you want to be self-realized? Because you want people to like you. You still want people to like you. And if you pursue understanding, you investigate the issue.
Then you understand what it is to be joy. To understand what it is to be joy means to be joy consciously, means to actually feel it as your very atoms.
You are Being, but there is also awareness of the beingness. This consciousness of beingness is understanding.
I ask her what she means by the feeling filling her. Here she realizes she is not only feeling an emotional state, but that the calmness and strength are effects of a sense of fullness in her body, which was in her belly but now increasingly pervades her body. The more she senses this fullness, the more it expands. The effect is that she feels a fullness of presence that is calm, peaceful, and collected. This makes her happy and contented. I ask her to recall her desire for autonomy and freedom. Here, she realizes that now she feels she is being herself. The presence of the calm fullness makes her feel present as herself. The more the fullness, strength and calmness expand, the more she feels present, present as herself. She experiences herself as a being, a presence, a fullness. She is not an action or a reaction. She is not a feeling or a thought or an image, but a firm, strong, full, and exquisitely alive presence.
The soul of the human being is the underlying consciousness of the individual, its living, intelligent awareness. It is the totality of the human being. All expressions of our aliveness, functioning, and consciousness are expressions of the soul. It is the soul that digests experience and that is transformed in the human being through experiences.
Joy is one of the potential qualities of the soul.
The soul can be compared to water that is shaped into an infinite variety of forms. In fact, water may be an especially good metaphor for the soul since its ancient root meaning is “coming from or belonging to the sea.”
Of course, water can also be dammed up, clouded by pollutants, asleep to itself. It is like the difference between seeing the water itself and seeing only its shape as a stream or waves. Or it is like viewing a painting and, rather than focusing on the shapes and color of the painting, seeing the texture and vibrancy of the canvas itself.
Soul does not refer to an enduring transcendent entity that is beyond our experience. Instead, it refers to our very consciousness itself.
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SOUL The soul is tremendously mutable and impressionable. Thus, it can feel immediate and alive, or transcendent and beyond life or death. As the fabric of experience, it takes on any texture, color, and pattern given it. At the same time, the soul can be experienced directly. Terms like flow, aliveness, spontaneity, receptivity, potentiality, malleability, impressionability, and unfold-ment can be used to describe the intrinsic qualities of the soul. The soul feels like a flowing substance, like protoplasm that is alive and conscious. Given this malleability, the soul is affected in an exquisitely sensitive way by experience. Because of this, it can feel stuck, dead, and occluded, as well as fresh, alive, and refined.
When the soul is structured by personality, it is structured in a defensive and fixated way. Thus, the personality’s experience feels stiff, stuck, dead, reactive, afraid, and frustrating. This restricts the flow of experience, and life seems to be shallow, meaningless, and limited. Experience filtered through a rigid and defensive structuring of the soul is inauthentic; we are alienated from our world and from our lives.
being bludgeoned with a club or wounded in your heart with a razor-sharp knife, but they generally bring a sense of a wound or cut. Closing yourself off to this wound closes your soul to its life and expansion. Other kinds of resistance may feel like rubber. Experiences, confrontations, or insights are “bounced back” instead of being taken in. The structures of the soul say, “I will take this in only so far, and then I will push it away.” The harder you try to get through that resistance in a head-on way, the more the rubber pushes back. Another kind of resistance seems like iron, especially in the head. Using our familiar mental patterns to resist, we may feel as if our heads were made of iron—heavy, thick, and impenetrable. A state that feels like lead is also a common form of resistance. Here we find a type of lethargy and indolence that weighs down any kind of movement, flow, or expansion.
Using the perspective of Inquiry, the basic aim is seeing the action of the resistance, how it manifests, what it is trying to avoid, and its long-term constrictive consequences.
The Diamond Approach works to refine and develop the soul. As the soul matures and develops, it gains new qualities and characteristics, developing and unfolding into deeper levels and dimensions. It is more open to expressing a greater range and depth of Essential states. When Ali teaches about unfoldment, consciousness, awakening, and realization, he is teaching about the soul. The practices and methods of the Diamond Approach are ways of working to clarify, liberate, and purify the soul.
The soul is you that is living, experiencing, thinking, feeling, responding. It is a psychic organism in the sense that it is an organism of experience, awareness, contact, feeling, responsiveness, desire, and action. It is a unified, total wholeness that is alive and energetic, that feels and acts as a unit.
It starts at the beginning as very simple, very almost like plasmatic, primal substance. Primal ooze. That’s why I call it the Swamp Thing. It is primitive in the sense a jellyfish is primitive compared to a lion. It’s not formed, not developed, not structured. With that come all the animal instincts, for instance for food, for safety. There is an instinct for pleasure and an instinct for movement with also a potential for growth and development, for evolution.
Young children try to get rid of what the parents say they shouldn’t do, and so they repress the wants, the impulses, the aliveness, and the exuberance to become what they believe their parents wanted them to be. What is repressed is really the living core of the soul. That part disappears, and we start defining ourselves through the eyes of the environment instead of being these spontaneous, creative impulses coming from within. That pure but animal-like, vital, instinctive, passionate, zesty nature is what we call the soul child. It is how you experienced yourself before you were civilized, before you learned what to be to fit into the civilized order. The soul child is the last time we experienced ourselves as our living soul. That living core got suppressed, and after awhile we forgot even the feeling of what’s it like to be a living, conscious soul.
reason we have the capacity to experience Being is that the self is an actual ontological presence, a presencing of Being, not simply a construct, and this presence has the capacity to be self-aware.
Chapter 4 Space
This spacious state brings an openness, an expansion, and a relief from constrictions. It is accompanied by a lightness, a greater sense of internal freedom, a reduction of mental anguish, and a sense of much greater potential and possibility than we had known before.
These boundaries divide inner space and the flow of experience that arises in it into discrete objects and actions. Special problems arise when we then use these mental structures to define ourselves. We are restricted in how we can respond best and how much we can develop. We become predisposed to certain patterns, and other possibilities continue to elude us.
Even though its end result may be in the service of growth, the disidentification that leads to space is unsettling and disturbing. For disidentification from self-images to be helpful, a person needs a strong and well-developed capacity to integrate new and unusual states. If the dissolution of boundaries is too radical compared to a person’s capacity to hold these states, it will be traumatic, and it will reinforce the defensive boundaries and resistances. On the other hand, given the necessary support to move into these states, growth and unfoldment can happen. This is partly the function of a teacher who understands personality structure and the deeper levels of emptiness and space.
Deficient emptiness comes from the loss of Essence in ego development. Ego development is both a cause and a consequence of the loss of Essence.
Because of this, any dissolving or melting of a self-image brings to consciousness the hole that was covered over by the self-image. This hole is really space seen through the filter of mental structures, mistaken beliefs, feelings, memories, and misunderstanding. Without these structures, deficient emptiness is revealed as space. Space does not feel deficient. Although it is empty, nothing is missing. Holes arise not from the loss of personality structure but from our abandonment of Being. Loss of a self-image or any ego structure only exposes the deficient emptiness that was at the core of that self-image. This allows it to be understood and dissolved. The problem is not the loss of the personality structure, as most psychologists believe, but the fact that deficient emptiness is at the core of the personality. As unpleasant and frightening as this may be, on the other side of this deficient emptiness lies space, clarity, and freedom.
Types Of Space
The clear space is the one most easily and often experienced initially. It is the sense of expansion, lightness, and clarity that I have been referring to so far. The specific issue that blocks it relates to a felt deficiency in ability and capacity. It is the sense of castration or being cut off from your source of energy and vitality. In terms of body image, this feels like a hole in the genital area. This hole is not related to your actual body or to your gender. When the genital hole is experienced, you often feel a disintegration and a fear of falling apart. However, when this issue is explored deeply and the genital hole is accepted, the clear space comes.
The black space is also felt as empty and light, but instead of being clear, it feels like blackness. It has a definite, though subtle, quality of peace, quiet, and silence about it. Its issue is the loss of identity and the fear that you will no longer be who you are.
Attachment and Space One of our deepest attachments is to our self-image, both how we see ourselves and how others see us. Our self-image is who we think we are, how we want to be, what we want to have in our life—whether it’s a house that looks a certain way, a certain lover or mate who fills certain criteria. “I’m a good person and deserve this,” or “I’m a bad person.” The self-image we are attached to is often negative. Everyone has some negative self-image. If you’re attached to being good, then you’re always finding proof that you’re a good person. You might be attached to
self-image of being good, strong, powerful, rich, beautiful, popular, being married, single, etc. This is the most superficial layer, and it’s where most people live. The most common level of consciousness is focused on this superficial image level. We usually identify with our self-image; we think that’s who we are. This question of identity with what we think we are is at the root of attachment. What we ultimately want is to fight for who we really are, to actualize, protect, and defend who we really are. We want to make what we really are permanent and, depending on our knowledge of what we actually think we are, that’s what we get attached to. In the beginning, identity manifests as the self-image, and most of humanity seems to be concerned with this level. Your identity is very much invested in the image, how things look on the outside, and that’s what you’re attached to. The self-image gets fed by myriad attachments, from your car to your friends, from your interests, likes and dislikes to your ideas and feelings, your philosophies, all of your conscious awareness at any particular time. The work we do here, on the other hand, is on the dissolution of the self-image. What we mean here by dissolution is simply seeing that it isn’t actually there. The dissolution of a certain identity is finally seeing that it is not really who you are, that the life that you have created around you is not really you. You believe that you can’t exist without it; that without these ideas, these things, these attachments, you would not be you. “How would I know myself?” you wonder. “How would anyone know me?” So the first level of attachment goes along with the first level of identity. It has to do with your ID cards. Just seeing that, “Oh, I believe that is me,” and checking, “Is that really me?” will make the identity more transparent. The sincerity and the understanding dissolve the self-image, just as any untruth dissolves when the truth is seen. When any self-image changes there is a sense of freedom, the emergence of what we call space. When there is space, there are no pictures, no boundaries. An image requires boundaries; it’s a picture of who you are. So space erases your boundaries; it erases the picture on your driver’s license, so to speak. You come to know yourself without the card. When you have no picture of yourself, there is space, the first level of the void. At the next level of attachment, the core of the self-image is the body image. At the deepest level, your self-image is based on physical reality, the body image. When I say “body image,” I include in that the shape of your body, how you feel about it, everything about your body, the organs of your body and the functions of your body. When you let go of the external cardholder identity, you find that then
your identity is based on your body image, so you sense yourself, feel yourself, pay attention to yourself and feel that you know yourself more intimately. If you think you’re beautiful, you like yourself; if you think you’re not beautiful, you don’t like yourself. You’re fat or you’re thin, you’ve got the right nose but the wrong mouth, or vice versa. These are the obvious body image concerns; it is part of the self-image, a kernel around which the rest of the self-image is built. It is attachment to physical things from the image perspective. The image…
From these distortions in our self-image we build all kinds of psychological self-image compensations: I want to be beautiful, dress this way, cut my hair like this, have certain kinds of friends, have this kind of environment around me, get the best fashions, the whole thing.…
It will also eliminate the attachments, because the attachments arise from this misunderstanding. And this will bring in the next level of the void, what we call the dense space, because the body is dense compared to the self, and it is felt or sensed in this way. So another level of space will come that will erase or correct the body image by understanding the body image, which will itself eliminate the attachments to the body image, attachments on the level of the physical image. Now the truth emerges that I am not my physical image. First we free our identity, our external self-image, then we free ourselves from the external body image. The next layer of identity is what we call the internal body image, or identification with the body regardless of the image, attachment to the body itself. Internal body image forms the core of the identity at this level, because of identification with the actual sensation of the body, the actual feelings in the body. It forms the core of both the body image and…
This identity with the internal body image creates attachment to the body itself, to physical existence itself. You need to understand that this is not your identity. You are moving beyond an image here; these are…
You find out at some point when you’re studying your attachment to your body, that you believe you have to hold on to your body to have it. You believe you need tensions in order to feel your body. If you were to completely relax, you would feel you were going to lose it, float away, so you grab on! That grabbing is the tension, and going…
You think your body is you, and you hold on to it for dear life, so you’re never relaxed. This level includes all the attachments to all the bodily pleasures, and the negative attachments to all the physical pains. It includes sexual pleasure, physical contact pleasure, movement pleasure, stillness pleasure, all the realms of bodily attachment to pleasure and lack of it. Attachment to the body then is not just attachment to the physical body, but also to what the physical body means to you, all the pleasures and the comforts and the safety you believe it gives you. There is nothing wrong with these things; it’s the attachment to them that creates the misunderstanding that is…
Becoming free from this attachment has to do with becoming free from the attachment to pleasure, all kinds of pleasure. It is the loss of attachment to physicality, to your body from the inside. It’s not a matter of image here, but of direct sensation, direct feeling. This identification is very intimate; it is something you’ve lived with all your life, and you always believe it’s you. Ultimately, it gives you comfort. When you see this identification for what it is, it also will dissolve, because it isn’t any more real than your driver’s license identity. This realization, in turn, brings in a new space, a new awareness of the void, what we call “death space.” At this point a person experiences what is called death. It is what happens when somebody dies physically. They actually disconnect from the body. Death is a deep, dark, black emptiness. Of course, this death space can be experienced in life. You don’t have to physically die; all that is required is to lose the physical attachment to the body, and the death space will be there. You will know what death is, you will know that you are not the body, and then the identification with the body will be lost. You will know what it’s like not to be connected with the body. At a certain level of realization, if you are conscious when you’re physically dying, then you will see that you’re not your body because you’re still there. There is consciousness, but the body is gone. Then you know that death is just a transition. It can happen in normal life without physical death. It simply means the loss of the physical attachment to the identity with the body. When you know that your identity is not the body then a new level of the void emerges, the black emptiness. Each level of dissolution brings in different experiences of the void, different grades of space. When the attachment to the body is understood, all the attachments begin to dissolve; you know that it is not you. You know you would exist without it. The need for the attachment is gone. Then there is not the fear and desire that will lead to the attachment to that particular body, to that particular level of identification. When the attachment to the body is understood, and you go through the death experience, you know you are not any of these things, images or sensations, and you see the true identity of Essence, the true self. This is death and…
Death is a deep, dark, black emptiness. Of course, this death space can be experienced in life. You don’t have to physically die; all that is required is to lose the physical attachment to the body, and the death space will be there. You will know what death is, you will know that you are not the body, and then the identification with the body will be lost. You will know what it’s like not to be connected with the body. At a certain level of realization, if you are conscious when you’re physically dying, then you will see that you’re not your body because you’re still there. There is consciousness, but the body is gone. Then you know that death is just a transition. It can happen in normal life without physical death. It simply means the loss of the physical attachment to the identity with the body. When you know that your identity is not the body then a new level of the void emerges, the black emptiness. Each level of dissolution brings in different experiences of the void, different grades of space.
At this point you begin to see hell more clearly and feel it more palpably. You start burning. The more attached you are to that identity, the more you feel the burning and frustration. Then the dissolution of self, or the dissolution of identity, is what we call extinction, annihilation, or nonexistence, which is a new level of the void. Not only your body is gone, but also your identity, your ego, is gone.
It is your truest nature, but the issue of attachment is not whether the object you want is good or bad, but that the movement of attachment…
True understanding will spontaneously bring in the deeper level of the void, which is complete, utter emptiness. There is no question of attachment to anything because there is literally nothing to be attached to, there is nothing. There is no image, no body image, no…
This resolution results in the big void, which eliminates identity itself—small or big, true or not true. There is no identity, nothing to identify. There is no object whatsoever, even a boundless object. This big void, or complete nothingness, is most necessary for freedom because it eliminates attachment. It is the freedom beyond which there is no freedom. Of course, with that freedom, there will come everything. Everything will be freed—the cosmic consciousness, the guidance, the true identity, the Personal Essence—all Essence in its various aspects will be there with no one experiencing it. It’s just there. To summarize, this process is a matter of investigating your identity, at any level of identification, and your attachments to it. That’s why one of the most powerful techniques in spiritual traditions is to ask yourself, “Who am I?” and to keep asking. Every time you say, “That’s me,” investigate and continue asking, “Who am I?” until there is no one left to say it. It’s not a matter of trying to push or do something. There’s no need to do anything at all; all you need to do is understand what’s there. The moment you want to do anything, your motivation is attachment. The awareness of exactly what’s there, whatever it is, without wanting or not wanting, is finally the void, the final freedom.
The Phenomenology of Space For most people the first sign that space is manifesting is the awareness of some definite sensation on the top of the head. It feels like a gentle tingling, or sometimes, as if something is brushing against one’s hair. If the person is ready for the experience, it will develop into more intense sensations at the top of the head which can sometimes feel painful. This will develop into the distinct physical impression of the presence of a hole on the top of the head, as if part of the cranium is missing. This is usually a gentle and pleasant impression, quite distinct and unmistakable. Lara is a woman in her mid-thirties, married with children, and at this time she is talking to me in a Work group setting. We are discussing her belief that it is bad or objectionable for her to be happy and joyful in a childlike, playful manner. I am aware that she is at the moment experiencing a lot of joy and delight, but she is reporting painful feelings. As she explores her defensive image of the suffering woman, she becomes aware of the joy she is actually feeling; she feels it pervading her chest. At this point she starts becoming aware of a tingling sensation at the top of her head. By focusing on it, she becomes aware of a specific impression of a hole or opening on the top of her head around the anterior fontanel. I don’t pursue this experience with her, partially because she is just experiencing a new expansion (joy), and partially because I know she has many fears about losing her sense of identity, fears that go along with a defensive stubbornness in thinking furiously and being in her head. What is actually happening in the experience of the hole is that the individual consciousness is in tune with the dimension of space in that area of the head. Since space is experienced as nothingness, there is the impression of a hole in the cranium, as if the top of the head has been surgically removed. This is not a hallucination; it is an actual accurate perception of the subtle dimension of space localized in that area.
This experience, if the person is not too frightened and is ready for it, will automatically develop as the perception of a column of space extending downward in the head. Now the person will be aware of it more definitively as an empty space, instead of as a hole. The mind is experienced as clear, empty, and lucid. It can happen also by a descent from above of a great spiritual stillness imposing silence on the mind and heart and the life stimuli and the physical reflexes.
This is a common action of space. It erases even the sense of body boundaries. The loss of physical boundaries is experienced as a lack of separation between inside and outside. It is also felt as pleasant, freeing, and unburdening.
Here then is the direct perception that the nature of the mind is really boundless space.
This happens either as a result of greater perceptual sensitivity or as a result of a deepening of the presence of space. Even the dark space can shine sometimes. It becomes a luminous blackness, as if the blackness has brilliancy. This feeling is similar to the experience of the peaceful and spacious darkness of the night. There is space and absolute stillness.
Our main interest here, however, is not in the pleasurable, golden merged state but in space and its connection to merging. The fact that, in some cases, the emptiness of space leads into a fulfilling golden fullness (or any other specific state) gives us a glimpse of the further uses of space, of the creative aspect of space. The golden fullness is not the only fruit of the creativity of space. The creativity of space is unlimited. In fact, the experience of space itself can develop and deepen into a higher form of space, a space that is neither empty nor full. It is a dimension of space where the physical boundaries of the body are not erased by emptiness, but experienced as space itself. In this case, space simultaneously holds two opposites: emptiness and fullness. It feels empty and light, but also feels full and has density. Space here is not an absence, but a presence. This is unfamiliar for the ordinary mind. However, this unfamiliarity is only a boundary that can be dissolved, or in this case, itself seen as a space. This phenomenon is known in Buddhism and referred to as the unity of emptiness and form. The Prajna-Paramita Sutra says: “Form is empty, emptiness is form; form is no other than emptiness, emptiness is no other than form” (Chögyam Trungpa, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, Boston: Shambhala Publications, p. 188).
Chapter 5 Essence
THE EXPERIENCE OF the human Essence is central in the Diamond Approach. Ali calls Essence “an actual and palpable ontological presence” and points out references to it in many of the spiritual traditions. Loosely speaking, it is the human spirit. Essence is always present, but we usually fail to recognize it as such, or we experience it only in mediated, dampened ways. For instance, when we feel tenderness and caring for a friend who is suffering, the Essential quality of Compassion is arising. However, when we are identified with our personality structures, we may experience this Compassion through emotions such as pity or sorrow or through our thoughts as a kind of logical deduction about our feelings. The experience of Essence itself, on the other hand, is direct and immediate. There is nothing between us and our experience. This immediacy and presence of Essence is deeply moving. By learning to recognize Essence, we learn to live at a depth unknown to most people. This depth of Essence is the source of an enormous richness. It is also the basis for genuine responses to the world rather than conditioned or constricted reactions. Essence cannot be adequately described in words, but the experience of Essence is unmistakable. In his books, especially Essence, Ali goes into greater detail in discussing what Essence is not (mental images, insights, emotions, bodily sensations, intuition, or…
A handful of psychological theories have also pointed to the true nature of human being. Abraham Maslow’s peak experiences and Being-needs, Carl Jung’s archetypes, and Karen Horney’s “true self” come closer to Essence. However, none of…
The content of mystical experiences and spiritual emergence, the Buddhist notion of Basic Goodness, the “vision” of vision quests, Heidegger’s notion of releasement—all of these refer to experiences of Essence. When Rumi writes about “the Friend” or “the Beloved,” when Kabir writes about “the Guest,” or…
It is also closely related to descriptions of a subtle or spiritual substance. Essence is, in fact, often experienced as a substance with texture, density, color, taste, sound, and the like. However, it is not a physical substance, and so it would be a mistake to equate Essence with physical energy or substance. Initially, this subtle energy or substance seems secretive and esoteric. However, Essence is not intrinsically hard to experience. It is not so mysterious; it is just difficult to recognize through the veils of our personality structures. Once it is experienced and recognized, it becomes easier and easier to see it as our very nature, omnipresent and underlying all existence. Because the personality is usually the focus or reference point of our experience, Essence may seem to come from outside. This can give Essential experiences a sense of grace, as if they were being bestowed. In fact, since Essence is more fundamental and intrinsic than the personality, it is merely outside our usual frame of reference. However, the distinction between inside and outside misses the point when your experience is open to the unfoldment of Being. It is…
Essence is, in fact, often experienced as a substance with texture, density, color, taste, sound, and the like. However, it is not a physical substance, and so it would be a mistake to equate Essence with physical energy or substance. Initially, this subtle energy or substance seems secretive and esoteric. However, Essence is not intrinsically hard to experience. It is not so mysterious; it is just difficult to recognize through the veils of our personality structures. Once it is experienced and recognized, it becomes easier and easier to see it as our very nature, omnipresent and underlying all existence.
However, the soul needs to develop and mature in order to experience these aspects fully…
Essence, as your basic nature or spirit, is always present, but the realization and accessibility of Essence is not. Full realization of Essence is possible only after extensive life experience and psychospiritual development.
ASPECTS OF ESSENCE On the personal level, Essence has precise qualities or aspects. Each aspect is a unique differentiated quality, and each has specific psychological issues associated with it. One of the most important contributions of the Diamond Approach is the discrimination and description of Essential aspects, along with their psychodynamic obstacles, in language appropriate to our time.
Most of us have experienced a warm, sweet, melting quality, perhaps focused in the heart. Ali calls this quality the Merging Gold Essence. The quality can feel like warm golden honey in the sun, a rich, sweet, satiated, and fulfilled quality. You may observe it in an infant who has just finished nursing, or you may have felt it just after making love. Merging Gold can bring a deep relaxation and a blending and merging of energies, as if you and your lover were part of the same sweetness. The Merging Gold Essence is not the result of these conditions, although these conditions can open many people up to this kind of quality. The Strength or Red aspect of Essence is characterized by experiences of vitality, capacity, and expansion. (The color of each aspect is often a good descriptive shorthand. Thus, the Merging aspect of Essence is called “the Merging Gold” and the Strength aspect is called “the Red.”) It is the source of energy that initiates action and is the means through which Being asserts itself. This aspect is the source of the courage to encounter…
Essential Compassion usually arises in the presence of suffering or hurt, either our own or others’. It is a tenderness, kindness, and warmth. The Compassion Essence is experienced as green. It may be a rich emerald green or a fresh, light green. Like other qualities of Essence, it may be experienced as a subtle vapor or green-tinted space, as a liquid with depth and fluidity, or as a solid emerald or green diamond. Each of these textures still feels tender and kind. It is sensitive to, and even appreciative of, suffering. When we see another suffering and we are able to withhold any fear-based impulse to rush in and help or run away, we may feel this kind of openhearted response arise. Essential Compassion is not the same as pity, sympathy, or reactivity; it doesn’t seek to take away hurt as much as it allows us to see, tolerate, and penetrate our hurt. Thus, Essential Compassion serves truth and understanding, the ultimate resolution to suffering. This truth, then, is the source of real and appropriate action. Essential Compassion opens the door to acceptance, action (fueled by the Red Essence), or simply being present with the hurt. Each aspect of Essence manifests in a particular way when it is blocked. Then we experience an imitation or “false” quality of Essence. For instance, blocked Compassion manifests as issues with hurt (either an oversensitivity to hurt or dulled, blocked feelings of hurt). False Compassion feels like pity or a demanding need for relief of pain rather than genuine tolerance of suffering and the ability to see into it. When we lose touch with the Strength Essence, it manifests as issues of weakness or anger, depending on whether the Red is merely blocked or a compensation is developed. False Strength, then, is an aggressive or hostile imitation of Essential Strength. These issues block awareness and integration of these Essential aspects and are resolved by these same aspects. Avoiding hurt blocks compassion.…
Essence It is true that Essence is a substance, but it is not an inert substance. It is a substance that in itself is life, awareness, existence. Take clear water, for example. Imagine that this water is self-aware, that each molecule is aware of itself and of its own energy and excitation. Imagine now that you are this aware substance, the water. This is close to an experience of Essential substance. Of course, this is hard to imagine for someone who does not know Essence. And the Essential experience is much more than this. Essence is not alive; it is aliveness. It is not aware; it is awareness. It does not have the quality of existence; it is existence. It is not loving; it is love. It is not joyful; it is joy. It is not true; it is truth. The quality of aliveness of Essence is of a different order from that of the body. The body is alive, but Essence is life itself. Essence is like packed, condensed, concentrated, completely pure life. It is 100 percent life. It is like a substance in which each atom is packed with live existence. Here, life and existence are not concepts, not ideas or abstract descriptions; rather, they are the most alive, most intimate, richest, deepest, most moving, and most touching stirrings within us. The experience of Essential substance can have such a depth, such a richness, such a realness, such a meaningfulness, and such an impact on our minds that some people actually get dizzy, unable to take the impact directly. It is not experienced as something alien, distant, or neutral, like a physical object or an idea. No, we experience it as that which is most intimately ourselves. It is most deeply our nature, and it is the most precious and most beautiful center of us. It is our significance, our meaning, our nature, our identity. It is what moves our hearts, illuminates our minds, fulfills our lives. It is so near a thing to our hearts that only the heart can taste it. It is so near a thing to us that it is actually the very substance of our identity. It is so significant a thing for us that it is the only true nutrient for our life. It is the reality of us, the truth of us. It is the very substance of truth and the innermost secret of all truths. It is the most precious thing in existence. Essential substance is so beautiful and magnificent that no imagination can conceive of its beauty, and no poetry can convey its…
Take clear water, for example. Imagine that this water is self-aware, that each molecule is aware of itself and of its own energy and excitation. Imagine now that you are this aware substance, the water. This is close to an experience of Essential substance. Of course, this is hard to imagine for someone who does not know Essence. And the Essential experience is much more than this. Essence is not alive; it is aliveness. It is not aware; it is awareness. It does not have the quality of existence; it is existence. It is not loving; it is love. It is not joyful; it is joy. It is not true; it is truth. The quality of aliveness of Essence is of a different order from that of the body. The body is alive, but Essence is life itself. Essence is like packed, condensed, concentrated, completely pure life. It is 100 percent life. It is like a substance in which each atom is packed with live existence. Here, life and existence are not concepts, not ideas or abstract descriptions; rather, they are the most alive, most intimate, richest, deepest, most moving, and most touching stirrings within us. The experience of Essential substance can have such a depth, such a richness, such a realness, such a meaningfulness, and such an impact on our minds that some people actually get dizzy, unable to take the impact directly. It is not experienced as something alien, distant, or neutral, like a physical object or an idea. No, we experience it as that which is most intimately ourselves. It is most deeply our nature, and it is the most precious and most beautiful center of us. It is our significance, our meaning, our nature, our identity. It is what moves our hearts, illuminates our minds, fulfills our lives. It is so near a thing to our hearts that only the heart can taste it. It is so near a thing to us that it is actually the very substance of our identity. It is so significant a thing for us that it is the only true nutrient for our life. It is the reality of us, the truth of us. It is the very substance of truth and the innermost secret of all truths. It is the most precious thing in existence.
life. It can and should be inseparable from us. The work of inner development is not aimed only at having an experience of Essence. It is aimed at the complete realization of Essence and the permanent existence of us as Essence. It is aimed at the eradication of our separation from Essence. To be free is simply to be. And to be is simply to live as Essence. In fact, when we are not consciously Essence, we are not existing. The life of the personality is nonexistence, a wasted and useless life. There is life only when there is existence, and existence is Essence. To be a genuine human being, a complete human being, is to be Essence. To be Essence is then not just an inner experience, but a total experience—a complete life. Life is then the life of Essence both inner and outer, in the privacy of our hearts and in the shared experience with others. Essence is then what dictates our actions, what determines our way of life, and what shapes our environment. This is real harmony. Essence Is the Life Essence is the promise. Essence is the life. Essence is the fulfillment of all our deeper longings. Essence is the answer to all our fundamental questions, absolutely—with no exceptions. This is such a fundamental point, but at the same time, such a difficult point to understand. When you understand it, it is even more difficult for you to accept. Usually, when you first come here, you are interested in getting something, or in getting rid of something—to get this or get rid of that. That’s fine. However, in time, by using the understanding of the Work, you will see that most of your suffering comes exactly from that attitude. And that is what has to change. This Work is not for you to get this or to get rid of that. What you have to change is something much more fundamental. It’s another part of you that has to start functioning, not that part of you that wants to get or get rid of something, regardless of what it is you want to get or get rid of. If you go deeply into yourself to understand your mind and your Being and the suffering in your situation, you’ll find out ultimately that there is no fulfillment but to be, to be yourself, to be your Essence. That to be is to be free. That to be is to be fulfilled. That to be is to enjoy. Everything else, if it is valued more, will be a hindrance to your fulfillment and satisfaction. As I said, it is very hard to accept. And because Essence is the fulfillment and satisfaction which is what everybody wants, what everyone longs for, we call this work “Ridhwan.” There is no exact translation in English for “Ridhwan,” but it is close in meaning to “satisfied,” “fulfilled,” “contented.” Ridhwan is a verbal noun in Arabic which not only means “satisfied,” “fulfilled,” “contented,”
To be free is simply to be. And to be is simply to live as Essence. In fact, when we are not consciously Essence, we are not existing. The life of the personality is nonexistence, a wasted and useless life. There is life only when there is existence, and existence is Essence.
but also means “satisfying,” “fulfilling,” “making content.” It conveys a quality and an action. Ridhwan is Being that acts, acts by its very being. Usually, our preoccupations are misdirected; they are preoccupations of the personality, which bring us suffering. We believe that if we get what we want, what the personality wants, we will be fulfilled. But fulfillment is ultimately the freedom from desires. So what I am saying is that being oneself, being one’s Essence, free from the desires of the personality, is the fulfillment. It’s not that you want your Essence so you can get something else. It’s not that you want your Essence so that you’ll get rich or fall in love and live happily ever after. It’s not that your Essence will enable you to have children, or do special things, or be famous. If this is your attitude, the dissatisfaction and the suffering will continue, because you are not seeing where fulfillment lies. It’s a very tricky business, this one. The reason it’s tricky is that the perception of Essence can come very close to the perception of certain emotional states. As many of you know, Essence is not an emotional state; it’s not an emotion. Essence is Being, is something that is actually, substantially there. Most of you fail to understand the significance of that point, of what it means for Essence to be there. Because you fail to understand the significance of that, you tend to confuse Essence with emotional states. When we experience Essence, we tend not to value our Essence as much as it deserves. We do this for many reasons. One reason particular to this work here is that it is easy to get it. In a year or two of working here, you start experiencing your Essence, which throughout history has been purported to be very, very difficult to achieve. So when you get it in this easier way, you tend not to value it. The culture we live in is materialistic. The more you pay, the better the thing is that you bought. If you get something without paying a lot, you don’t think it’s worth much. It works the same way with your true nature. Because it is easy to get, a lot of the time you don’t see the significance or the value of it; you don’t realize that without Essence, there is nothing. Without Essence there is only suffering.
When we experience Essence, we tend not to value our Essence as much as it deserves. We do this for many reasons. One reason particular to this work here is that it is easy to get it. In a year or two of working here, you start experiencing your Essence, which throughout history has been purported to be very, very difficult to achieve. So when you get it in this easier way, you tend not to value it. The culture we live in is materialistic. The more you pay, the better the thing is that you bought. If you get something without paying a lot, you don’t think it’s worth much. It works the same way with your true nature. Because it is easy to get, a lot of the time you don’t see the significance or the value of it; you don’t realize that without Essence, there is nothing. Without Essence there is only suffering.
There is another more universal and general reason why we don’t value our Essence. We talk here about how much of your suffering, how much of your conditioning, resulted from the lack of love in your environment. Your environment wasn’t supportive, wasn’t loving, did not respond to you appropriately according to your needs, did not see your value. That is true. But we don’t see the fundamental thing that happened. The fundamental thing that happened, and the greatest calamity, is not that there was no love or support. The greater calamity, which was caused by that first calamity, is that you lost the connection to your Essence. That is much more important than whether your mother or father loved you or not. You lost your own love because of that. Because your value wasn’t seen, wasn’t responded to, you lost your connection with your own value. Because your joy was responded to with hostility or judgment or disapproval, you had to cut it off, and you lost it. And now we believe we will have it if we get that approval. “I will have value if somebody sees the value in me.” We lost it because no one saw it. But we’ve seen that what matters is experiencing it, and why should we care whether someone else approves or not? If your Essence is going to depend on the…
Being who you are, being your Essence, should be completely independent of any other factor, inner or outer.
The reason is that when our Essence is lost in childhood, when our parents don’t see our value, don’t value us for just being there—when this happens, our own value is lost, the Essential aspect of pure, absolute value is gone. And as we know, a deficiency results, a nothingness, a hole in the place of that loss. When an Essential quality is cut off, the result is what we call a hole, a deficiency, a lack. And we attempt to fill that hole, that deficiency, by trying to get value from the outside, instead of seeing that the value was ours to start with, that we were just cut off from it. But there is an even more difficult complication, which is that one way to fill the hole is to make a false value, to pretend to yourself that you have value when you don’t feel you really do, because to feel the absence of value, its lack, is too painful. So most people tend to create false Essence to cover up their feeling of lack. What the personality consists of is false qualities of Essence. We call the personality the “false pearl.” Each person retains the memory of what was lost and will try to imitate it, will try to act, believe and feel in ways that are so close to the Essential qualities that after a while the person fools himself, and other people as well. Some people do this more than others, and some people are better at it than others. The personality is really nothing but an impostor trying to take the place of Essence. And these false qualities of Essence, what we call the crystallization of personality, are what we see in most of the people around us who are called successful. Everyone else believes they’ve got it made. They appear to have genuine qualities of confidence, compassion, self-assurance, self-esteem—but for the most part, these are false qualities. Just as these people have convinced themselves that these false qualities are real, they convince almost everyone else as well.
But there is an even more difficult complication, which is that one way to fill the hole is to make a false value, to pretend to yourself that you have value when you don’t feel you really do, because to feel the absence of value, its lack, is too painful. So most people tend to create false Essence to cover up their feeling of lack. What the personality consists of is false qualities of Essence. We call the personality the “false pearl.” Each person retains the memory of what was lost and will try to imitate it, will try to act, believe and feel in ways that are so close to the Essential qualities that after a while the person fools himself, and other people as well.
We think, “If I’m the only one around who’s got it, I’ll end up all alone.” Yes, you might. All alone and happy. That’s a choice that each one of us is going to have to make. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you will have to be alone, but it does mean that you have to make the choice of being willing to be absolutely alone, if that’s what it takes to own your Essence. Eventually, you will be faced by this choice: Do you want to be “loved” and “appreciated” and “seen” and miserable? Or do you want to be “alone,” “uncared for,” “everyone thinks you’re terrible,” and happy, genuinely happy, at the same time? That’s a choice everyone will have to make. That is the true independence, the true realization of Essence, that your Essence is not dependent on your exterior life at all. The whole world might be against you, but if you are your Essential self, you will be content. As long as you hold onto wanting something from the outside, you’ll be dissatisfied, because there’s a part of you that you are still not totally owning. How can you be complete and fulfilled when there’s a part of yourself you are not owning? How can you be complete and fulfilled if you believe that you can’t own this part until somebody else does something, or the right condition arises? If it’s conditional, it’s not totally yours. What we’re doing here is fundamental. We’re not playing a little game of getting a little something here, a little something there. There’s no real resolution, no real fulfillment, until a person is totally committed to the Work, and can face being alone. Essence is the answer. You have to see that and accept it completely. Nothing else will do. No half measures. All the way. Absolutely all the way. You’re going to be alone, and you have to be willing to be alone. Essence transcends life and death. After a while, when you start realizing what your Essence is about, even if you are threatened with death, so what? Who cares? Die, live—what’s the difference? And you know that if other people don’t like you, it’s fine. It’s all the same to you. You’re not going to change yourself to suit anyone else’s ideas of how you should be. In fact, you can’t have any real intimacy until you can tolerate your own aloneness, integrity, individuality. That is freedom.
Chapter 6 The Theory Of Holes: Abandoning And Recovering Essence
ALTHOUGH ESSENCE IS OUR TRUE NATURE, we live virtually all of our lives out of touch with it. If Essence is intrinsic, how does it happen that we do not live from that place? This question is at the heart of spiritual work. For in understanding how we abandon our true…
ABANDONMENT OF ESSENCE In the beginning of your life, your soul is pure and open. Essential states arise as they are needed. For instance, the Strength or Red Essence came when, as an infant, you needed food, and the Merging Gold Essence came when your needs were fulfilled in a satisfying way. Of course, you didn’t know or understand these experiences. Neither were they integrated into your soul in a mature way. They simply arose in a natural and spontaneous way. However, as you develop, interactions with the world are imprinted on the soul. The earliest experiences will be a mix of support and nonsupport. Support allows the unfolding and development of the soul in a way that is open to Essence. The Essential states that arise begin to be integrated into the soul, and the soul develops accordingly. Nonsupport, in the form of…
the broader sense of being accurately mirrored or when there is active suppression or rejection. This can occur when parents are out of touch with some aspect of their own being and get defensive when that aspect is present in you. Defenses develop to protect you from the pain of rejection and abandonment. These defenses produce patterns or structures in the soul, and the soul begins to rigidify. Consequently, aspects of Essence are gradually lost to consciousness and the functioning of the soul. The various intrinsic qualities of our Being are split off. As this happens, we lose both awareness of these qualities and access to them. Of course, Essence itself is always present in the infant and in the adult, whether it is experienced or not. Although we sometimes refers to the “loss” of Essence, the Theory of Holes is actually referring to the loss of the experience of Essence. Essence is not lost; it is abandoned. In adults, this abandonment is experienced as a hole or an emptiness, both psychologically and energetically. If the Essential aspect of Will is blocked, you may experience anxiety or lack of support. This experience may also be felt as a hole or an emptiness in your solar plexus, the energetic center related to Essential Will. If Essential Compassion is blocked, the hole may feel like an emptiness in your heart and a lack of kindness either toward yourself or toward others. The hole of Essential Strength can result in a feeling of weakness, lack of capacity, or an absence of vigor and passion. These holes are painful, so painful that we develop ways of removing them from awareness in order to function in our lives. The consequences of this attempt to protect ourselves from pain and anxiety are enormous. The complex psychodynamics involved in splitting painful experiences from pleasurable ones are a central cause of the development of personality structures. The development of these defensive personality structures coexists with other, less defensive and more functional structures. Yet much of the personality structure serves to (1) defend against painful experiences and (2) compensate for lost qualities of Being. The resulting personality or ego is defensive and inauthentic, out of touch with its nature. It is rooted in a sense of deficient emptiness and separation from its source. As I have said, a soul separated from Essence develops…
Yet much of the personality structure serves to (1) defend against painful experiences and (2) compensate for lost qualities of Being. The resulting personality or ego is defensive and inauthentic, out of touch with its nature. It is rooted in a sense of deficient emptiness and separation from its source.
the hole of Compassion as hurt and attempt to “fix” the hurt by becoming loving in a desperate and solicitous way. This false Compassion serves as a defense against the underlying feelings of hurt or cruelty and as a substitute for genuine Compassion. Compensation for the hole of Strength includes identification with passivity and weakness or aggression. Identifying with these compensations and fake qualities constitutes the basis of the shell of the personality. At the same time, because they are imitations of Essence, they can help us find the genuine qualities of Essence. The shell’s experience is based on mental images of self and other from the past. The structuring gives it a sense of rigidity, compulsivity, fixation, and stuckness. When this structure breaks down, it is common to experience emptiness. This emptiness usually feels like the lack of a particular quality, such as Strength, Love, Will, Peace, yet it can also feel like a general and nonspecific deficiency. There is a tendency in spiritual circles to judge the ego as bad. While seeing ego as a source of suffering and a false substitute for your true nature, the Diamond Approach also recognizes a wisdom in the ego. The ego is, in a sense, the best we could do in the difficult situation of a childhood that did not recognize our Essence. The ego developed in part to provide the necessary support and holding for survival and growth. Thus, it is not the ego per se that is problematic, but the identification with it. More important, the ego serves as a pointer to Essence. Because the ego exists as an…
RECOVERY OF ESSENCE Once you understand the condition of being out of touch with Being, two things need to happen. First, the ego structures need to be softened, melted, and seen through so that Being can be more fully experienced. These ego structures are defenses against feeling the wounds of having abandoned Essence. Exposing the defenses allows us to experience the underlying wounds or holes. Since the real wounds are the abandonment of Essence, experiencing them reveals Essence. The ego structures and defenses block Essence; by working through them, we experience the holes themselves. Thus, we recover the Essence that was blocked. This is the work of self-realization. Second, these same aspects of Being that were repressed need to be integrated into your life and allowed to mature. This is the work of self-development. Since Essence is not really lost, the recovery of Essence is a process of opening into what is deeper in your nature. Relating to the childhood wounds makes it seem as if you were “going back” to recover something that was lost. Instead, the recovery of Essence is a matter of realizing its presence and influence here and now and integrating it into your soul. Essence is the ground under your feet, always there but forgotten, longing for you as you long for it. Individual work on the recovery of Essence includes three broad steps. Basically, they retrace the steps involved in the loss of the experience of Being. In the first step, you become aware of a pattern of compulsive emotions, behaviors, and thoughts. This may be felt as a continuing hurt, difficulty, wound, compulsion, or inauthenticity in your life. These states stem from the nature of the ego as conditioned, compulsive, reactive, and stuck. The second step explores these issues more deeply, often with the use of awareness and mindfulness practices, bodywork, and the guidance and support of a teacher. The ego-shell begins to soften or dissolve. Here, you contact the emptiness or deficiency that lies at the root of the emotional issues or compulsive behavior. This deficiency is the lack of Essence and, if experienced deeply, leads to an experience of space. Space indicates the melting or deconstruction of some part of the personality structure. If you stay with the experience of space, the third step occurs, the manifestation of Essence. Essence may initially be felt as a…
For instance, the loss of the will is generally related to fears about castration, as we discussed earlier. The loss of strength is related to repression of anger and also fear of separation from mother. The loss of compassion is always due to suppression of hurt. Each “hole” is filled generally by the same thing, with variations depending on the childhood history, and the cultural and social circumstances of the person. Compassion, for instance, might be replaced by sentimentality and belief that you are a loving person; intuition might be replaced by excessive ideation, and strength by a show of being tough.
If you deal thoroughly with the set of issues related to a given state, if you reveal an aspect of the false personality as an attempt to fill a hole, if you go all the way into that sense of emptiness, through the fear of feeling it—all the way—you will get to that quality which has been lost to you. We have seen this over and over again in our work here.
It doesn’t work. You can try to fill the deficiency of the loss of love with the love of another man. But since it is your own love, your own will, for which you ultimately long, you will feel dissatisfied with the love and support from the father substitute, whoever it is you are using to fill the deficiency. You know now that you can experience your own love, or your own will, only by allowing yourself to experience the “holes,” the deficiencies associated with them, instead of trying to fill them. This is very difficult and frightening. A lot of spiritual disciplines use techniques to enable students to stay with these things. But when you finally can do it, the real resolution happens, the resolution not of simply resolving the emotional conflict but of retrieving the lost quality. The presence in you of the quality of love will finally eliminate the problem of love for you.
The presence of will is what will eliminate the sense of castration, or powerlessness. Nothing else will do.
Essence Is the Teacher
Chapter 7 The Personal Essence: The Pearl Beyond Price
“You must be somebody to become nobody.” This is accurate in the sense that the permanent transcendence of ego requires a stable ego structure and an integrated, coherent sense of self. However, if this is misunderstood, it can seem that spiritual awakening requires the loss of being your own person. Then, being personal and autonomous seems to run counter to spiritual realization. After becoming somebody and then nobody, a new question arises: How can you be yourself while being nobody?
The Pearl
There would appear to be a contradiction between our impersonal Beingness (“the nobody”) and our personal autonomy (“the somebody”). The Diamond Approach resolves this contradiction by recognizing an aspect of Essence called the Personal Essence, the Pearl beyond Price, or simply the Pearl. The Pearl has the qualities of autonomy, beingness, personalness, and contact. It is the embodiment of independence, authenticity, and integration of all your aspects. Your ability to live in the world in satisfying and fulfilling ways and to have genuine personal contact with others is rooted in the Pearl, but its origin is Essential, spiritual, and unconditioned rather than historical and conditioned. The Pearl is often experienced as having a soft, round fullness, pearly-colored and luminescent, with a feeling of authenticity and wholeness. The Pearl is the embodiment of “being in the world but not of it” in that it supports functioning from an authentic place rather than through the object relations of the ego. The characteristics of such functioning include the capacity to learn and grow, delay gratification, integrate experiences, be spontaneous, and maintain healthy, authentic,…
PERSONALITY AND THE PEARL Since each aspect or pattern of the ego is an imitation or a counterfeit of Essence, they point to qualities of Essence. For example, stubbornness imitates Essential Will, anger imitates Essential Strength, and pity imitates Essential Compassion. The personality is a substitute for and counterfeit of an Essential aspect, the Pearl. The ego develops in response to situations in the world in order to support functioning, foster integration, create stability, delay gratification, promote self-respect, and provide a sense of personal dignity and worth. Over time and through healthy interactions with other people and the world, the ego structure develops and its functions mature. However, a healthy ego is not the end of development. As the self develops, the ego is no longer the foundation of our experience. Some would say it is transcended. However, the ego characteristics are not abandoned in self-transcendence but emerge in a more full and integrated way in the Pearl. As a refinement of ego development, the Pearl embodies the functional characteristics of the ego in a way that is authentic, open, and flowing. It is the true personality. As we explore our identifications with our conditioned personality, we may come to experience the false Pearl. This is the totality of our sense of individuality, autonomy, and personalness that is based on defenses and attachments. It is…
kind of thickness and stickiness in our experience rather than the light, flowing quality of Essence. Since the false Pearl or personality is rooted in the belief that we are our attachments and identifications, the fear of losing them is a deep and difficult issue. It will arise again and again in our deeper spiritual journey. However, seeing through the false Pearl is necessary for manifesting Essence in a personal and integrated…
DEVELOPMENT OF THE PEARL As the Pearl develops, the ego structures are integrated or metabolized into the self, and you mature in a personal, integrated, and well-rounded way. The Diamond Approach suggests that the ego is not so much transcended as it is metabolized. However, most of the time, such metabolism is blocked or is at best only partial. Experiences that are not integrated give rise to ego structures. Identification with these ego structures forms a counterfeit of the Pearl. This false identification is a source of suffering. The Pearl develops as experience is digested. At the same time, the more developed it is, the more experience can be digested without the need to form the defensive, rigid structures of the ego. In a sense, the ego and the Pearl are parallel developments, one inauthentic and one authentic, rather than strictly sequential steps. Ideally, as the ego develops, it is metabolized into the Pearl. When, because of psychological barriers, the Pearl’s development is stunted, the ego develops without being integrated into Being. Later, when the Pearl is recovered, the old, not-yet-metabolized experiences and the psychological structures built around them must be integrated. Thus, the Pearl grows and develops. The Pearl is the only Essential aspect that does develop. This is in contrast to other Essential aspects, which are whole and complete in themselves. For example, an infant may experience the Merging Gold Essence when it is nursing and being held in a positive and loving way, feeling satisfied, contented, and melted into a union with the mother. As adults, we can experience this same Essential quality. The infant’s Merging Gold is just as real as the adult’s,…
example, in the integration of the Strength Essence with the Merging Gold. Remember that some of the qualities of the Strength Essence are assertion and passionate aggression. The Pearl brings the capacity to relate to others with an integration of this assertion and a melting union. We can sometimes find a place that holds both the energy of the Strength Essence and the melting of the Merging Gold without compromising either one.…
Some of us are very clear and present on matters of love, compassion, generosity, and caregiving, for example, but have difficulty standing up for ourselves and our own needs. One explanation of this is that we are highly realized in the Essential aspect of Compassion but not Essential Strength and Will. Thus, it is difficult for us to see and direct loving impulses or to direct the energy of love where it is needed most, including toward ourselves. Or we may be highly developed in many aspects, but in spite of this development, there remain blocks in the Joy aspect. In this case, we may seem clear and present but joyless and somber. The Pearl ensures and enables a more complete, well-balanced, and integrated development.
Ego Development and Spiritual Transformation The Personal Essence can be seen as the integration or absorption of personality into Being, as the synthesis of the man of the world and the man of spirit.
The Personal Essence is the real person, the true individuality. It is what is meant to be realized in ego development. It is the actual goal and completion of this development. It is the real individuation. It is not on the ego level or the spiritual level; for it is neither and both. There is only one human individuation, and that is the realization of the Personal Essence. In contrast, object relations theory, and developmental psychology in general, consider ego development a complete process on its own, and spiritual teachings consider ego development either as a wrong development, or as a development that should be superseded by spiritual development.
When the individual finally perceives it, the contented expression often is “But this is me!” The sense is of oneself as a precious being. There is then a fullness, a completeness, and a contentment. It is as if the individual feels full and complete, realized. Nothing is lacking. No more search, no desire or wanting anything else. The person feels “Now I have myself. I am a complete individual. I am full. I am fullness. I am complete. I want nothing else.” It is the experience of being oneself and not a response or reaction to something. It is not being something for somebody. It is in a sense complete freedom, the freedom to be.
ego. We must remember that the ego is a structure, or a structured process, whereas the Pearl is Essence, which means the Pearl is an ontological presence. We call it the Personal Essence because among all the Essential aspects it alone is personal. It is experienced as having a personal flavor to it, in contradistinction to impersonal. All aspects of Essence, even love and kindness, are impersonal. But the Pearl is personal. And this is its miraculous quality, totally unexpected and unfathomable. Some people interested in inner development try to become objective and impersonal, to move away from identifying with the personality. The personality is personal, and so the personal feeling is mistrusted and avoided. However, the Pearl beyond Price feels personal without being the personality. It has the capacity to make a personal contact with another human being and still be free, totally unconditioned, free from the past and its influences.
Others might call it God becoming a human person, an individual. One way of understanding the various aspects of Essence is to see them as the differentiation of the source. From the undifferentiated source the differentiated aspects of Essence emerge and are realized. Then, there emerges a synthesis, a rounded personality that is Essential. This integration of all aspects of Essence into a new and personal synthesis is the Pearl beyond Price.
The systems built around awareness, for instance, will not understand and might even oppose the systems built around the Merging Essence. Each believes he has the truth, and both actually have the truth. But neither has the whole truth. Another clear example is the apparent contradiction between the teachings built around emptiness and the teachings built around existence. However, if the precious Pearl becomes the objective of the system, then there is an innate and built-in safeguard. To really develop and establish the Pearl, all sectors of the personality have to be explored and understood. For the Pearl to develop, all aspects of Essence have to be freed, which will expose all sectors of the personality. Freeing it and establishing its life enables it to displace the totality of the ego structure. Then there is balance, completeness, totality, harmony, fullness, and contentment. There is then no reason to oppose someone or to convert anyone. All inner compulsion will be gone, for the person is realized, and the realization is based on fullness, richness, and value. The individual is then a mature human being, a complete person. The station of the Pearl beyond Price is so significant because it is not a matter of a state of consciousness or a state of being; it is rather the condition of the actualization of your realization in your life. Being becomes personal being, a complete human being living fully the life of objective truth.
Chapter 8 Self-Realization And Essential Identity: The Point
MOST PEOPLE ON A SPIRITUAL journey are sincerely motivated by a longing to know themselves, to find or create a life with significance, and a desire to truly be themselves. We seem to know that our souls want to realize their own true nature in ways that are uniquely ours. Most of the time, we take genuine pride in our accomplishments and contributions to the world. Our work and our relationships are generally satisfying. We appreciate the recognition we receive from our friends and colleagues. We feel we know and like who we are.
These traditions point out that by identifying with our sense of individuality, we cut ourselves off from the very source we seek.
ESSENTIAL IDENTITY The answer to these questions, according to the Diamond Approach, lies in the struggle for identity. The ego identity is an imitation of the Essential Self or Essential Identity.
At some point, a shift must be made from having Essence to being Essence. The center of our experience must shift from the ego (which has experiences of Essence) to Essence itself; Essence must become our identity. This is the work on the Essential Identity or, as Ali calls it, the Point. The Point is Being experienced as our identity. There is a sense of focus and simplicity about our lives. We relax into an authentic sense of our uniqueness. This realization is less about a particular experience and more about our relationship to our experience. It is a matter of being at home with ourselves and having a sense of being fulfilled with whatever we experience. Essence shifts from being an external object to being the center.
A particular need for mirroring emerges for the toddler around a year to a year and a half old. At this stage, children are full of confidence and energy, just learning to walk, climb, and navigate their world. They feel invincible, omnipotent, and special. However, in terms of their bodies, this feeling is not realistic. They are not able to tell that this feeling does not reflect the power of their bodies but the magnificence of their Essence. They need positive and realistic mirroring of this sense of grandeur in order to continue to develop and integrate it. They also need support for the inevitable fall from grace as they grow to realize that they are not so omnipotent after all. Without the necessary mirroring, they fail to develop the awareness of their connection to Being and their Essential Self.
The lack of attunement to the child’s true nature, combined with the powerful forces of conditioning, creates a new identity based on the need for love and pleasure and the avoidance of abandonment and pain.
This wound is the gap between what we actually are, Essence, and what we take ourselves to be, ego. The reaction to the narcissistic wound includes a deep sense of hatred and an intense desire to bring down, devalue, or harm the cause of the wound. We can recognize such narcissistic rage in our hurt, frustration, and jealousy when we feel hurt, rejected, abandoned, betrayed, belittled, or shamed.
THE SHELL Abandoning Being and compensating for its loss results in the development of what Ali calls the shell of the personality. A shell (in this sense) results from taking a part of reality, the surface, to be the whole. When we are identified with it, it feels familiar and even reassuring. However, as we are able to step back from it a bit, or when it cracks because of a disruption in our mirroring or idealizations, we realize the shell is fake, shallow, and without depth or substance.
The shell fixates the ego, which continues our separation from what we really are, reinforcing our identification with the false Self. We may experience it as a pervasive sense of effort. This effort is accompanied by other attempts of the ego to maintain itself: choice, desire, motivation, hope, preference, attachment, rejection, holding, grasping, trying, wanting. To the extent that these reflect the activity of the shell to avoid the narcissistic wound, they will only perpetuate the gap between our true nature and the ego.
THE EXPERIENCE OF THE POINT With this inquiry into the shell, several things happen. We may notice that a kind of soft compassion arises, much as we would feel seeing a child struggling with a difficult but critical task. We may experience the arising of what Ali calls the Diamond Will, a steadfastness and sense of capacity that supports our Inquiry. This Diamond Will is more universal than the personal Essential Will. An experience of Black Space also arises, a deep, still kind of emptiness. Eventually, the Point itself appears. It has been described as a brilliant star, a radiant point of light. The Point manifests in our awareness as a shooting star that is omnipresent. This radiant shooting star is everywhere at once, moving in every direction. It has no source, but rather feels like the source of all perception.
Each time the Point arises, we are self-realized, and the more expansive the Point, the more deeply we realize our true nature. We no longer are an ego that has Essence. We are that Essence itself. We recognize ourselves as whatever Essential states or dimensions arise. If fullness arises, we know ourselves as fullness, not as a self that is experiencing the state of fullness. If compassion arises, we are not compassionate; we are compassion.
Identity The most tenacious sector of the personality is the sense of identity, the sense of self, or what is called in depth psychology the ego identity. In ego psychology and object relations theory, a distinction is made between ego and ego identity. The ego is the overall process and structure. But the ego identity, the self, is the organizing center, the apex of the developmental process.
Object relations theory believes that the ego identity or self-representation develops gradually in the process of structuralization of the ego. The belief is that it does not exist at the beginning of life but develops through the processes of internalization and identification. But the question of where the sense of identity itself comes from never arises.
Ego identity is an imitation of the identity of Essence, the true self. The Hindus call it the Atman.
This true identity, this aspect of I-ness, is what Ramana Maharshi, for instance, wanted his disciples to reach when he exhorted them to contemplate the question Who am I? To free this aspect means finally to shift the identity from the ego to the Essence. This is the most difficult part of the process.
This medium is homogeneous, unified, whole, and undivided, exactly like a body of water. This homogeneous medium is consciousness. The medium is conscious and aware of itself. It is not aware of itself by reflecting on itself, but by being itself. In other words, its very existence is the same as awareness of its existence.
I have used this term throughout this book, sometimes referring to true nature as objective reality or as Being. It is Being without any distortion by our personal history. The true nature of Being is not constructed or invented. We recognize it when we penetrate the subjective biases that obscure it. Then we see it without distortion and realize it is always here. True nature gives a texture to our experiences. The more we are in touch with it, the more we find our experiences to be flowing, beautiful, full, clear, and pure. There is a sense of mystery. We become aware of the world, and our awareness is luminous, radiant, and delicate. We feel that everything is majestic and real. To the extent that we are in touch with true nature, all our experiences take on tones such as these. There is no particular experience or state that is “higher” or more valuable according to true nature. Instead, when we move deeply enough into any experience, it reveals its deepest characteristic and its true nature. True nature is not a state of consciousness; it is the ground of all consciousness. There are many veils that separate us from an awareness of our true nature. In our usual experience, Essence and its specific aspects are veiled by ego.
We discover we are always held in the arms of a limitless loving light or, as Ali calls it, the Living Daylight. It seems that all experiences and all forms are held in and pervaded by a universal and boundless loving embrace that is sweet, delicate, supportive, and unfailingly responsive to our deepest need. Experienced through the mental function, this dimension is a consciousness that is alive and radiant, revealing the beauty of existence. Experienced through the heart center or in a heartful way, it is more like a boundless love. Experienced through the belly center, Divine Love is felt as a conscious loving presence holding and enfolding us and the world.
THE SUPREME Nondual consciousness does not stop with this beauty and love, despite our tendency to want to hold on to it and reside there. When this dimension of beauty and love is experienced deeply enough and without attachment, its nature is revealed as a fullness and presence. Beauty is now seen as a surface quality, and its substance or depth is pure existence.
THE NONCONCEPTUAL Penetrating the pure presence and unity of the world, we discover its ground as awareness with no content or concepts.
spaciousness, a profound void now penetrating the shell due to the shell’s almost complete denudement. As the self is letting go of its representations of itself, which feels like the surrendering of everything we believed we possessed, we become increasingly transparent to the presentations of Being.
As we remain in this condition, surrendering all manipulations and desires, this profound emptiness dissolves the remaining vestiges of structure, and propels us into the full and direct experience of this deepest of all voids. But we then discover that this most profound inner spaciousness is also identical to the absolute depth of all Being. We have arrived home; our poverty has been the doorway.
Epilogue The Flame Of The Search, Guidance, And The…
Now it is time to direct it to you and your journey. Your immediate experience—approached with courage, compassion, trust, and surrender—is both the path and the fulfillment of your potential as a human being. Living fully and…
First, there is the inner fire that motivates and fuels this work. Ali calls this the flame of the search. At first, it may feel like an itch in your soul or a longing that returns again and again. Your suffering may wake you up to this fire. It can start as an ember that, when touched by the breath of your sincerity, catches fire, calling you out of your sleep, calling you to look deeply into yourself. All the layers of veils that have built up through your life make the work unbelievably arduous. And it is exactly here that the flame serves you, bringing the energy it takes to stay with your journey. What is motivating your questions and your search right now? What keeps you asking for a more meaningful and fulfilling life? Can you recognize the flame in yourself as a kind of hunger, a desire, a longing? The feeling may be subtle at first, but it will grow. If you can let this…
begin to love the truth unconditionally, your life unfolds with power, tenderness, and meaning.
joy. So you want to see it regardless of how difficult it is. It is no longer a question of what is a true statement or perception or not.
Your knowledge and understanding are the ways Being knows and understands itself. Your life becomes a vehicle for Being.
When you are open to your particular suffering and willing to be empty, alone, and intimate with yourself, your true nature is revealed. Being comes to know its own Essence.