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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.
AI Summary
The Diamond Approach by A. H. Almaas, John Davis presents key insights from the Diamond Approach tradition. The 10 passages above capture the essential teachings.
Core Themes:
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Key Passages: Highlights 1, 3, and 10 are particularly representative.
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