Editor’s Preface Fundamental to the Diamond Approach is the recognition that ultimate reality, the underlying ground of being, is the deepest truth of what we are. We are but a form manifesting out of it, and so the human soul expresses the depth, richness, and ultimate nature of that ground. As such, the pursuit of what is true in a person’s experience cannot help but lead eventually to the ultimate mystery of our innermost nature.
Approach. By discerning what is true in our own experience, we invite our beingness—our true nature—to reveal itself. Often this involves going through many layers of belief and conditioning that obscure this underlying truth. There is no rush or pressure to get to the bottom of things but rather a simple willingness to allow and be with the truth in any given moment. We learn to trust that if we can be open, nonjudgmental, and nonreactive, the immediate truth—whether it manifests as emotion, thought, or sensation—will reveal something deeper that has been hidden. As we inquire in this way, ever deeper truths will continue to be revealed.
The guidance for this exploration and discovery of our personal truth lies in our heart. The mind may discriminate our experience, but it can only speculate and reason, without knowing directly what is real. The heart, on the other hand, listens, tastes, and knows what is true by being one with the experience, staying closely in touch with and touched by life. As such, the personal, spiritual journey of inner realization relies on the heart knowing what is real and following its guidance.
True nature is drawing us through love. Without recognizing it, we are being drawn toward home, where we will feel undivided, whole, contented, and fulfilled because we will know ourself in our deepest nature.
The best the mind can do is help us clarify what prevents us coming nearer to the mysterious Beloved. And at some point, the mind must surrender completely to the endless mystery, as the path will take us beyond all concepts, words, and efforts to understand.
Introduction
All genuine spiritual paths are oriented toward the realization of this ultimate source. In Kashmiri Shaivism it is known as Shiva; in Advaita Vedanta it is Parabrahman; and in Mahayana Buddhism it is Dharmakaya. For Kabbalists it is Ain Sof, for Christian mystics it is the Father, and for Sufis it is the divine essence or the mysterious essence of God. In this teaching, we refer to this fundamental truth as the Absolute, recognizing that it is pure mystery. This is not to imply that all these names refer to the same experience, for the ultimate mystery reveals itself in different ways in different paths, and in different individual beings.
For some the search is felt directly as a passionate desire to be one with the divine, and that is the nature of the path expressed in this book. This search is powered by an intense yearning for something not yet known or understood, and the growing recognition that the heart will not be satisfied except by finding this hidden mystery and becoming one with it.
The natural process of emptying the heart of absolutely everything, good or bad, eventually takes us into mystical poverty, as described by St. John of the Cross in his treatise The Dark Night of the Soul.
The union we have longed for turns out to be nothing but the cessation of the individual soul and its dissolution into this majestic beauty, leaving only the absolute Beloved to shine as the only and singular reality.
One The Discontent of the Heart
The primary method we use on the path of the Diamond Approach is inquiry, which means observing and exploring our own felt experience in the moment and seeking to discriminate what is true in it. Even though inquiry is always focused on the love for truth and the love for realization, its use of the discriminating mind means that people often don’t recognize how much this path is a journey of love.
When we inquire into, explore, and wonder about this discontent of the heart, this lack of a sense of complete satisfaction and closure regarding the question of love, we recognize that it is a very deep and profound discontent. It’s this discontent that has driven many of us to keep looking for the perfectly satisfying object, and we will do this until we are mature enough to see that the heart’s discontent has nothing to do with any imperfection in our love objects.
The Guest Arrives Only at Night Annihilate mind in heart, Divorce heart from all relationships, And then love,
Love passionately, Consume yourself with passion For the secret one. When you are absolutely poor, When you are no more, Then the Guest will appear And occupy his place, In the secret chamber, His abode, The heart he gave you. He is the inner of the inner, He is the secret, He is the Guest, And he arrives Only at night.
In truth, the heart does know it, but the eyes have not seen it. It’s because the heart knows its true Beloved that it is still discontented—it feels the pain of not being united with it.
Practice Session: Biography of the Heart’s Loves and Discontent … If you can work with other people, you should do this exercise in a group of three. If you’re alone, you can do it in writing. Each person will do a monologue for fifteen minutes. If you haven’t done one before, a monologue is when you talk (or write) for fifteen minutes, and the idea is to express whatever comes up spontaneously, without censoring anything. You maintain an attitude of curiosity and interest in whatever arises in you, and you keep exploring it, seeing what you can notice about it. Whatever you notice—thoughts, feelings, physical sensations, or a combination of these—can help you to discover more about it. As each person talks, the other two just listen, without interrupting. They are witnesses to your inquiry. In this monologue you basically want to uncover a biography of your heart. You want to explore its history of love, especially in relation to its contentment in love. How contented is your heart in its loves, and what keeps it from being completely contented? So it’s a personal exploration of the love relationships in your own life—with people or things—and how contented your heart feels.
you want to make it personal to you, and just let it unfold as you notice whatever the source of your discontent seems to be. And then you can go deeper into it: “Is that really the only reason why I’m still discontented?”
That’s why the Sufis like to use the Arabic word for the heart, qalb, which comes from the word qalab, meaning “turn over” or “change.” That comes from the fact it’s an organ that is always changing or transforming, and that’s part of the need for vulnerability, the fact that it can never stay the same. But that also expresses our true nature, our true condition, which is always changing and transforming, bringing many kinds of experiences and impressions. So there are many ways of experiencing love, and many ways of experiencing things around love. There are many kinds of hurt, many kinds of sadness, many kinds of loss, many kinds of pain. But for the person who loves, who is a true lover, these are not of any concern. Hurt, sadness, rejection, fear, terror—these are not the concern of the lover. The concern of the lover is whether the Beloved is there or not. All these other things are just side effects.
is. So there is no safety, no stability, no constancy, no predictability. That’s the case with any kind of love, whether it be in terms of the inner path or normal human love.
2 “Object relations” refers to the recognition that it is through one’s earliest relationships with others that the basic impression of oneself (the perceived “subject” in the relationship) is formed, and that this is dependent on whatever impression one has formed of the other person (the perceived “object” of the relationship). The internalized memory of these early object relations is rarely a true reflection of the actual relationship. Nevertheless, the resulting fixed impressions of self and other, plus the emotional charge felt in the relationship between them (love, desire, frustration, etc.), are carried over into all subsequent relationships and interactions in life, acting as filters through which they are experienced.
Two The Divided Heart
We’ll begin with a poem. I’ll begin most chapters of this book with a poem that relates to the subject matter. This one is by Kabir, an Indian poet, and it’s from The Kabir Book, translated by Robert Bly. Inside this clay jug there are canyons and pine mountains, and the maker of canyons and pine mountains! All seven oceans are inside, and hundreds of millions of stars. The acid that tests gold is there, and the one who judges jewels. And the music that comes from the strings no one touches, and the source of all water. If you want the truth, I will tell you the truth: Friend, listen: the God whom I love is inside.[1]
When it says “inside,” it doesn’t mean just inside us. It means beyond the apparent, so inside of everything. Of course, the way to approach it is inside ourselves—it’s difficult to approach it by going inside somebody else, though some of us may try to do it that way.
Being orgiastic, love doesn’t like boundaries and barriers. It doesn’t like separation, and it makes us want to bring things together. So when you love ice cream, for instance, it’s not enough to just look at it through the window. Notice that. You stand in front of the ice-cream parlor and see all the different flavors of ice cream, and your love of ice cream will push you to want to go inside and buy a few scoops and make sure you get completely, thoroughly united with them.
When the Beloved finally shows up, we recognize it—it is one hundred percent clear and certain, make no mistake about it. It doesn’t matter what anybody says, the heart knows it for what it is. And the more we know and recognize the inner Beloved, the more our heart moves inward toward it and our love for it increases.
Most important of these characteristics is that the inner Beloved is completely polygamous but requires monogamy from us. That’s the first thing; it will love everybody, but there’s a sense in which it wants you to only love it—nobody and nothing else. If we see it in human terms, we could say that the inner Beloved is one hundred percent possessive and completely jealous. If you so much as look at somebody else, it says, “See you next time.” It can’t share the heart with anybody else. It says, “The heart is my place. If you put anybody else there, you’ll never find me.”
At times this love fades, and so our commitment to make it primary gets forgotten. We get involved with other loves, and abandon it in some sense. But then we remember, and the love for the Beloved comes back. Sometimes it reappears as a quiet yearning—there’s a gentle burning in the heart that leaves the soul feeling a little bit of yearning for the Beloved. The love that is then reawakened might be gentle, sweet, and delicate, accompanied by a soft, quiet feeling of appreciation. That appreciation might then grow stronger; it becomes more powerful and the sense of value in it is heightened. And our love can then become passionate again, deep and intense, flooding the soul and overwhelming the senses.
The ancient Greeks, for example, had among other words: eros—romantic, passionate love; philia—friendly affectionate love; storge—unconditional familial
love; agape—selfless, universal love.
It’s also important to note that when it comes to love, we cannot be proud or arrogant and be a lover.[2] That’s because to really be a lover means that when the Beloved is absent, we are willing to feel separated, to feel abandoned, to feel the unfulfilled desire and yearning, to feel the incompleteness, and to feel deficient. A proud person doesn’t want to feel these things—how can pride tolerate a feeling of deficiency? So humility is a very important quality for the heart.
Practice Session: The Divided Loyalty of the Heart … In this exercise you will work if possible with one or two other people. Each person in the group will do a monologue for fifteen minutes. If you are alone, write out your exploration for fifteen minutes. Explore the situation of your heart in terms of its divided loyalty, its lack of unified faithfulness, its many beloveds. You want to consider the many objects that compete for your love with the Beloved—your inner truth—and how this competition manifests for you personally. We don’t see it at the beginning as disloyalty or lack of unified faithfulness; we see it as ordinary human life. But let’s look at it in light of the fact that we have become more aware of the inner Beloved. We want to see how all these loves compete with it in our heart and vie for our love.
AH: Right. So that shows that one thing that the division of the heart does is preserve our sense of self, so in that way we are not overwhelmed by the love.
We know it’s not a matter of going to extremes—abandoning external relationships and remaining single, or becoming an ascetic and living in a monastery. That can’t be the solution. So, what I found that works, a secret of the heart that I’ve already alluded to, is to be very clear about the question of priority: The inner Beloved must always be the primary Beloved. All other beloveds are secondary, always and with absolutely no exception. So with my deepest and dearest friend, or anyone that I love deeply—even with my partner—it doesn’t matter how important the relationship is, it’s not as important as remembering the inner Beloved.
When the sincere lover stamps his foot upon the neck of the world of forms, we know his spiritual resolve desires only a Beloved of transcendent attributes; and that he will not submit his own neck to any beloved chained with the fetters of shape and image, nor the tie of knowledge and union. No, all forms are now erased from his contemplation: he sees the Beloved directly, without the intermediary aid of form. As the Sufis say, “God can be seen clearly only when formal limitations dissolve.”[1]
So the true lover is not distracted by forms. And as our heart becomes less divided and more unified in its love, as its faithfulness to the inner Beloved becomes stronger and more sincere, the heart steadily divests itself of the various images and forms of its particular loves, both outer and inner. The more our heart lets go of these images and forms, the purer it becomes and the more devoted to the formless inner Beloved, which then begins to take precedence over all our other loves.
The true lover is willing to sacrifice everything, willing to give it up without any promise of anything in return, because nothing else matters. It’s like what you may have experienced if you’ve been strongly and deeply in love with somebody. If someone else comes up to you and says, “I really love you. I want to be with you,” do you say, “Okay, fine,” as if the one you love is easily replaceable? No, of course not. It’s either the one you love or no one. It’s the same with the Beloved, but a million times stronger, because the heart knows that the Beloved is completely irreplaceable—there is nothing else like it. Nothing will do what it can do. Nothing else will fit exactly in the heart. It’s like the heart is designed in the way that the bezel on a ring is designed for a gemstone. It’s designed for that particular stone, and only that stone will fit that ring. So you have to find the one love that will fit the heart, just as the ring has to find the only stone that will fit into it. This need to shed all that we love, and our willingness to give up all that we have and sacrifice it at the altar of love for the Beloved, will lead us to what we call mystical poverty and the dark night of the soul. Going through mystical poverty, going through the dark night of the soul, ultimately means recognizing that we have to give up everything, until in the end we have absolutely nothing. At the stage we’re looking at here, it’s a question of renouncing all our objects of love—everything that we love, cherish, and value.
It’s more that the heart is just flooded with love for the Beloved and the forms are dissolved and melted by the flood of love itself, by its sweetness, gentleness, and delicacy, and also by its passion and power. The images of our previous loves vanish the way little soap bubbles do. We can also experience the love as an all-consuming fire, whose flames incinerate all the forms. Whatever way we experience it, the heart wants only one thing, and the mind doesn’t even know what that one thing is. The heart simply feels, “I just want to be near the Beloved, and nothing else will do. The nearer I am, the happier. The farther away, the sadder I am.” So in the fire of love for the Beloved, the heart is indeed like a shish kebab, turning one way and another as it’s cooked. Turn it one way, a little farther away from the Beloved, and it’s sad, filled with an ocean of tears.
If the shish kebab turns the other way, closer to the Beloved, the sun of joy arises—you’re just the happiest thing, and it’s the happiest day. You only need to be a little bit closer, to feel a little more nearness, and the heart knows it. Sometimes you don’t even realize you’re getting nearer; you just find that you’re feeling happy. “Why am I so happy?” you might wonder. You inquire into it, you look more closely and keep asking, “Why am I …?” And then you see it and feel it: “Oh, it’s because I feel nearer and closer!” If somebody asked you, “Nearer and closer to what?”—you’d say, “I don’t know, and I don’t care. I don’t have a name for it. I just feel nearer. My Beloved doesn’t have…
Even the slightest distance feels like we’re millions of miles away. Before, we were so numb that we couldn’t tell how far away we were, but now we know the precious intimacy of its nearness, to be separated from it feels like a tremendous loss that makes our whole world feel empty and impoverished. All these difficulties will arise—the conflict, the fear of loss, and the…
The more we can recognize these fears and conflicts as associations of the mind to the process of getting nearer to and more intimate with the Beloved, the easier it is for us to let them go and let the heart deepen. The love then becomes more powerful, more immense, more burning. You can let the burning just burn and burn, so you feel completely on fire. Everything is burning—body, mind, heart, and soul. And sometimes everything is melting. Sometimes it’s dissolving. Sometimes it’s just disappearing. These are different ways the heart transforms.
Practice Session: Barriers to Fidelity of the Heart … This will be a monologue, working with one or two other people if possible. Each person in the group will do a monologue for fifteen minutes. If you are alone, write out your exploration for fifteen minutes. You want to explore the conflicts, issues, and distractions that arise as you feel your love for the inner Beloved taking you deeper and beyond your usual love objects. What doubts and uncertainties arise for you? Do you recognize any feelings of loss, separation, guilt, fear, and anxiety? Can you get a sense of where they are coming from?…
Questions and Comments Student: What strikes me most, and what’s the scariest part right now, is that sometimes a very impersonal quality will arise that isn’t loving per se. It isn’t warm and huggy, and yet it’s very powerful and sometimes absolutely silent. When that happens inside of me, I feel panic. A. H. Almaas: It’s normal to feel panic when that happens. But the Beloved does not always feel loving and huggy. Sometimes it does, but frequently it’s just powerful and annihilating, and when it’s annihilating, it’s scary.
But, basically, the attitude of the heart is that whatever comes up—any question, any issue—it just melts it away with love. The solution is that as love intensifies and deepens, it becomes more powerful and just overwhelms all these things. As I’ve said, the love basically destroys boundaries, destroys limitations. So every time we see something like that, it’s okay to see it, it’s good to see it, but the way of the lover is that it just intensifies the love. So what does the lover feel? The lover says, “I don’t know what this is about, and I don’t know how it’s going to work. I just recognize that it’s love, and it’s a longing for the Beloved.” That way the love becomes purer and deeper and more unified. It’s the same as the way we work with inquiry and loving the truth for its own sake. Whatever it is, whatever happens, it doesn’t matter—we just want the truth. Here, we’re calling the truth the Beloved. Or we can call the Beloved the truth. But they’re both names, and in a way that’s beyond that, the heart just has to have its Beloved.
What’s clear is that for the lover who really loves the inner Beloved, love is not just a matter of feeling sweet and comfortable and cozy. No, the path of love is actually sometimes more intense and more powerful than the path of the warrior. It’s also tougher sometimes. And the range of experience, between the pain and the ecstasy, is much wider, because here we’re dealing with the heart. So the lover needs to be more courageous than the warrior. The warrior knows fear and needs to be on guard and skillful in protecting itself from what it fears. But the lover has no guard at all. For the lover it’s always surrender, always giving, and always giving in.
Five Beyond Divinity
The degree of discontent we feel in our heart is therefore the most direct measure of how intimate we are with our true nature, with its depth and completeness. The heart knows this so well it acts like a Geiger counter—the closer it gets to the truth, the faster and louder it ticks. The farther away it gets from the truth, the slower and quieter it becomes, until after a while you can barely hear it. The mind doesn’t have that kind of sensitivity, nor do the instincts. We’re discovering that when we see truth as the Beloved, our attitude toward the Work is completely different—it’s a whole other ballgame. All our concerns, fears, and conflicts become less important—just fodder for the journey, fuel for the love. It doesn’t mean they’re neglected or rejected or not attended to, but we see them as side effects of the journey rather than our main concern. Our main concern is the Beloved because, basically, the heart wants the Beloved and nothing else. Everything else is incidental—just a reflection, a reaction, or an association. The heart knows this and will not be fully contented with any of it.
Our superego can become like one of the magistrates of the Inquisition of medieval times, threatening to damn and punish us for being a heretic.
Six Poverty of the Heart
If we let it be, we may be able to see that what’s happened is a clearing of the heart—a letting go of all our attachments. But we see it as an absence of heart because we’ve been so accustomed to seeing heart as all the usual feelings, reactions, preoccupations, and responses that come with all the various kinds of love. We’re used to having our heart be full of those objects that we love, so when we’re no longer attached to them and they’re not there, the heart is indeed empty. What we still haven’t fully understood is that the heart is supposed to be empty for the Beloved to enter it.
we come to recognize that all the loves we’ve cleared from the heart never really belonged to us anyway. We can then see an important truth: This condition of emptiness that we want to reject is actually the natural condition of the heart that hasn’t yet recognized its Beloved. And we can see that this fundamental emptiness has always been there—we’ve just been covering it up by filling the heart with all our objects of love.
because the ego self means that the soul is divorced from her Beloved.
This emptiness is necessary if the Beloved is to appear. It’s the beginning of what’s called the dark night of the soul, when the Guest can arrive. And we’ve learned that the Guest only comes at night, which means everything’s gone dark and there’s nothing to see.
That’s the thing, you see—sometimes something takes me several months to understand and process, but in somebody I’m working with, maybe it will only take a day or two.
Practice Session: Staying Faithful to the Inner Beloved
your heart has been shish-kebabbed.
You know when it’s been shish-kebabbed, so you know then that when this condition of feeling no love arises, it’s not just a defense where the heart is closed. You see, when the heart is closed or we’re being defensive—like in a schizoid condition, for instance—the reason the person isn’t feeling anything is because they aren’t able to feel anything. The feeling function hasn’t woken up yet. In the condition of poverty of the heart, the person isn’t feeling anything because there’s nothing to feel, even though the person is capable of feeling very deeply because the feeling function is developed and mature.
So what drives this power of attraction? Well, we’ve already established that it’s the power of love at work, an optimizing dynamism that seeks to overcome separation. We’ve seen that this is what drives our spiritual journey, because we feel it as a fundamental attraction toward the truth, a pull toward reality. And the pull is not just to know it but to overcome our separation and become completely one with it, all the way to full realization, full identity with the truth.
Falling in love is the expression of the unity that is already there, that wants to know itself and express itself through this glowing, beautiful, ecstatic lovingness. At its purest, this love is sacred because it is selfless—it has combined the selflessness of love with the gravitational
The fact that magnetism is a fundamental characteristic of love only becomes apparent when our wanting comes not out of need but out of love. This kind of wanting is not longing or yearning but a very powerful desire—a desire of the heart. That’s one reason why I see magnetic love as a distinct manifestation of love different from its other qualities. It reveals the inner secret of love—that love is a force, not just a presence.
Ten Stupa Love
longer. We don’t have to keep sidestepping ourselves to fully love the Beloved and feel the true fidelity and commitment that this requires. We may have struggled to do this before because the self was unloved or wounded in various ways, but this has all been burned through, melted by the love that’s coming from within.
The Stupa is one of the diamond vehicles,[3] and in it all the essential qualities arising as various flavors of love are integrated into one thing in the heart. So the heart is now the presence of essence itself with all its qualities, felt as the purity of love that is also personal. The Stupa is faceted, but it is precise, clear, and unoccluded. That’s why it has such a sense of amazing purity and wholeness to it, and a sense of grace and surrender that is sublime.
This ecstatic, passionate love is what I call the pomegranate love.[2] Pomegranate love has a deep dark red quality, and a zesty, searing kind of sweetness and passion. The passion implies that the Beloved is already being felt from within the heart and the soul is already beginning to dissolve.
We’ll never be able to escape that orbit unless our love goes beyond the duality of lover and Beloved.
Without cease gazing into the purity of the Friend’s face, he sees the universe imaged in his own reality and if he once looks back into the chamber of his heart he finds there like a blazing sun the sweet face of his heart-thief.[1]
Fifteen Divine Darkness
Divine darkness is something that’s known in some Western traditions, especially in Christian mysticism. It is frequently associated by Christian mystics with the Father, and the dynamic emergence from it is associated with the Son, or Christ.
The Mystical Theology, one of the most well-known texts about divine darkness, by Dionysius the Areopagite. He describes the entering of divine darkness in terms of Moses’s ascent of the holy mountain, and he conveys the paradox of knowing by not knowing. And then Moses is cut off from both things seen and those who see and enters into the darkness of unknowing, a truly hidden darkness, according to which he shuts his eyes to all apprehensions that convey knowledge, for he has passed into a realm quite beyond any feeling or seeing. Now, belonging wholly to that which is beyond all, and yet to nothing at all, and being neither himself, nor another, and united in his highest part in passivity with Him who is completely unknowable, he knows by not knowing in a manner that transcends understanding.[1]
The extreme limit of the divine darkness is the divine coma, when all consciousness disappears—there are no more glimmers, no more flashes, no more insights, no more experiences. There’s just complete cessation and absolute rest. In some sense that’s what the heart wants, to reach its own limit, where there is nothing more to feel. The cessation of not just mind but also heart takes us into the absolute mystery of a delicate, magic enchantment and bedazzlement.
We use our mind frequently for distraction and reification instead of going deeper, but definitely the mind can be used, especially if we have the true inner guidance. That’s what we do in this work, in our inquiry we use diamond guidance, which means the capacity to use the normal mind, the thinking mind, to connect with the true mind, to go to true discrimination, and in that way be able to follow the heart.
This feels like the greatest loss imaginable, and it’s only natural that the prospect of saying farewell to everything we’ve known brings tremendous grief and sadness. We know we’ve always loved the world, but we only see it clearly as a love object with this final movement toward the absolute.
It feels like we’re facing a decisive conflict between two powerful loves again—the love for the inner Beloved and its mystery, darkness, and exquisite intimacy, and this reemerging love for the world.
Neither state is tolerable permanently, however, so the conflict involves going back and forth between the two—the independence, and the rapprochement when the child wants to return to dependency on the mother.
But when we behold and then become that luminous nature, and look from its vantage point, we recognize that the world is simply its luminosity. Everything, all the manifest forms we perceive, are nothing but patterns that the radiance of the Beloved assumes. They’re not just a reflection of the Beloved—they are emanations.
When we see the Beloved in its wholeness now, it’s still the darkness and mystery—nothing has changed in that regard. But without adding or taking anything away, we recognize that the mysterious nonbeingness of the absolute, that complete contradiction of all logic, is itself the world and everything in the world. Absolutely. There’s not a nanometer of distance between the Beloved and anything in the manifest world.
So as we move toward the absolute, if we either fear that we’re going to have to leave the world behind or experience some kind of world-weariness, it means we’re still participating in the duality created by our mind. We still believe that the world is some kind of dispensable add-on to the absolute. It isn’t.
When we are in this station, we can allow our love free rein, and love deeply, passionately, and sweetly, without any conflict. How could there be conflict if we know that our beloveds and the Beloved aren’t separate things? So there’s no guilt about apparently abandoning the unmanifest Beloved as we’re drawn to the manifest world, because we know they are one. There’s no longer any separation between the inner and the outer, the formless and the form. This means there can be all kinds of love—emotional, spiritual, physical, or aesthetic—and we know that they are all an expression of our love for the Beloved.
Whatever we love, we know it’s simply because it reminds us of the Beloved.
We realize now that we are actually monogamous even when we might appear to be polygamous because in reality there is no polytheism, only monotheism.
Eighteen Intimacy
So this absolute formlessness and nothingness is very mysterious and paradoxical, and it challenges some of the fundamental positions and beliefs we have about reality—what we consider to be reality, and not just our beliefs about it.
The Beloved can therefore be seen as boundless and infinite, but it can also be seen as just one infinitesimal point.
This condition is often referred to as unobstructedness or transparency, but in terms of the heart, in the language of love, it feels like we’re completely in touch with all of existence. The heart is completely open, completely delicate, and completely soft—so soft, delicate, and open that it’s deeply in touch with everything and everyone. But it’s not like one is in touch with the other. There is no other. There’s no separateness and no duality in this intouchness, so no obstruction or limitation whatsoever—there’s just the experience of immediacy, of being in touch with everything as one unified thing.
Tell me how you experience intimacy. Just say spontaneously how you experience and feel it.
AH: Sounds right. The inner solvent appears and dissolves things. That’s what happens with intimacy. The more intimacy, the more dissolving, and we can experience the dissolving agent in one way or another. It is more like a fluid than anything else, but it really is a nothing, which flows like a fluid. A river of nothing. And that’s why it annihilates.
(merged from “…The Heart’s Journey to Divine Unity” edition, 2026-06-23) Lovers share a sacred decree— To seek the Beloved. They roll head over heels, Rushing toward the Beautiful One Like a torrent of water. In truth, everyone is a shadow of the Beloved Our seeking is His seeking, Our words are His words. At times we flow toward the Beloved Like a dancing stream. At times we are still water Held in His pitcher. At times we boil in a pot That is the job of the Beloved. He breathes into my ear Until my soul Takes on His fragrance. He is the soul of my soul— How can I escape? But why would any soul in this world Want to escape from the Beloved? He will melt your pride Making you thin as a strand of hair, Yet do not trade, even for both worlds, One strand of His hair. We search for Him here and there While looking right at Him. Sitting by His side we ask, “O Beloved, where is the Beloved?” Enough with such questions! Let silence take you to the core of life. All your talk is worthless When compared to one whisper Of the Beloved.[1] My body and my mind are in depression because you are not with me. How much I love you and want you in my house! When I hear people describe me as your bride I look sideways ashamed, because I know that far inside us we have never met. Then what is this love of mine? I don’t really care about food, I don’t really care about sleep, I’m restless indoors and outdoors. The bride wants her lover as much as a thirsty man wants water. And how will I find someone who will take a message to the Guest from me? How restless Kabir is all the time! How much he wants to see the Guest![1]