And I want to put you in direct touch with the beating pulse of it as it continues to grow and flourish as a living teaching. The Jeweled Path covers mainly the first fifteen years or so of the path’s unfolding, referring only briefly in the last two chapters to the two and a half decades that followed. I chose to focus on what kinds of processes and dynamics were involved in the emergence of the Diamond Approach and its initial stages of development instead of detailing the content of the teaching and the path in full. In the course of our journey, we moved through many endings, many deaths. Along the way, specific turning points marked distinct passages to new realms of consciousness, exposing radical shifts in perception and the experience of reality. Each one revealed even more of the mystery of Being, giving birth to a continuing series of transformations of our sense of self. And every experience opened the way to a deeper understanding of True Nature without dismissing what had come before. An elegant system was divulging itself, presenting its wisdom for the road inward by reorienting our minds, hearts, bodies, and souls. Step by step, we followed.
Although a great deal of understanding and synthesis occurred spontaneously as the experiences were revealing themselves, much of what developed into the formal teaching was synthesized, systematized, and refined in hindsight by looking back at the copious notes that Hameed made along the way in his journals. The thoroughness of his record keeping is remarkable. Tracking the detailed, interlacing threads of our processes would have been impossible without them. Rereading those journals as I wrote this book gave me the opportunity to follow the timeline of the teaching as it displayed itself through our experiences. I saw relationships between segments of the teaching I’d never noticed before, and when Hameed and I discussed them, new details of the teaching were unpacked.
Thirteen of his books are edited transcriptions of new teachings, which are given mainly at his yearly Asilomar retreats. The first nine books were published under his own imprint, which he named Diamond Books. Beginning with Spacecruiser Inquiry: True Guidance for the Inner Journey in 2002, Shambhala Publications took over the publications of his books.
It is replete with the difficulties and delights of moving into the deep unknown. It is also a tale of friendship and spiritual
companionship, of life, adventure, mystery, and the beauty of the invisible world manifesting its secrets. Of course, mine is only one voice, one vantage point, among many.
1 The Journey Begins
Mild-mannered, introverted, quiet, but not acquiescent—that is how Hameed saw himself. A mentally autonomous young man, he actively questioned his teachers and was never satisfied with the party line. If something didn’t make sense to him, he persistently questioned it and would not take anyone else’s answer as the answer. He often challenged biblical stories and images of God that were in the Qur’an. When presented with God as a being who punishes the bad and takes revenge for wrongs committed, he thought to himself, “God can’t be that way—it doesn’t fit with who God is supposed to be.” His mind, already capable of operating in the spiritual sphere, took on the logical, scientific approach to the exploration of physical and metaphysical realms that he would apply all throughout his life.
Loving the truth was the beacon he would follow, and it eventually became one of the central precepts of the Diamond Approach—the love of truth for its own sake. While mind is a necessary instrument for discerning and synthesis, the heart lights the way to uncharted territory and enables one to feel and know with intimate immediacy. The two work as one to charter the inner realms, much like the mariner’s astrolabe. The heart provides the sense of direction toward the innermost reality; the mind contributes its gift through its capacity for discrimination and understanding in the wake of experience.
The strength he expressed was much needed to address the participants’ issues, which were usually laden with heavy challenges. Yet he was sufficiently at home in himself to let his heart show.
We fell into a feedback loop that parlayed the energy of exchange into a shared journey of discovery. Our mutual lack of self-consciousness spiced by an inquisitive interest formed the right conditions for our tête-à-têtes to evolve into multifold inner-life adventures.
9 When the Student Is Ready…Essence Delivers
If you imagine the human consciousness to be like a translucent prism, it refracts light without distortion. The personality that develops through conditioning alters the prism. The light of Being has to move though the dross of our memories, reactions, and identifications. Through the occlusions, the light appears not only dimmed but distorted as well, and manifests as reactive emotions rather than palpable qualities of immaculateness.
Straining to get somewhere, I realized, was a product of my ideas and assumptions about where I should go. What I discovered was that the way to take that next step was to not try to take one at all.
Exposing the hold my past had on me freed up the “answers” from within. What I needed always showed up in unanticipated ways, through presence arising as a specific quality that seemed to be just the right solution to my query, similar to the particular herb in the wild that serves as an antidote to a poisonous plant nearby. I later understood that questions were the tiny bits of gold that led me back to the mother lode, to the source of Being. To presence.
suit. The ideas I had of love, will, kindness, joy, strength, and so on were shrouds over the naked, beautiful truth of the light in me that was the immediate felt knowing of these essential properties. Kept at a distance by my usual way of experiencing, they now revealed themselves to be like pure waters of the heart’s and mind’s immediacy. Substances of different colors arose like liquescent rainbows from some heavenly palette—vibrant ruby red, liquid emerald green, flowing golden amber, swirls of sapphire blues and violet, fluid yellow sunshine.
Without fail, those who experienced the red ruby-like light felt its heat to some degree and would declare they felt expansive, capable, assertive, or strong.
and the black essence beckoned us into the unknown mysterious depth, erasing doubt and opening us to the luminous night. Each one seemed like a passage to a universe of its own.
These aspects arose unbidden, in connection to inquiries into emotional content taken to their furthest end. Sometimes an aspect of presence might emerge within daily life or during a meditation and remain for minutes or hours—even for days or weeks. It would flush out unresolved, often painful, issues that would surface to be worked through. Blockages appeared after initial openings, but as these were understood, heavenly gifts followed, arriving one after the other—assistance, blessings, expanded capacity, surprising insight. Sooner or later, the process would begin all over again from a different angle; another unconscious psychological issue would bring with it the pain of being separate from this blissful elixir. The power of presence lit up everything that needed to be seen, felt, and understood. As presence presented itself in various ways to be known, each individual’s uniquely conditioned personality and beliefs would be exposed.
This was the perfume of the viscous, colorless presence that Hameed had gifted me. He referred to this light perfume as “the lataif dimension of presence.”3 Sufis differ from one another in their understanding and application of this phenomenon, but all share the view that the lataif are centers in specific areas in the body that become activated from a dormant state when true spiritual clarification starts to occur.
The process of wading through the emotional hurts and reactions as they lived in me now required earnest, kind attention, courage, and patience, but chiseling away at the ego, a little at a time, transformed me bit by bit and reunited me with the true, pure essential qualities.
subtle, perfume-like substance that became a more viscous experience of presence over time.
how the body was being impacted by this conversion of consciousness from its dim existence to the awakened, transparent colorful elixirs of light.
popping out of their gauzy webs, springing forth into the world in unsheathed glory with the characteristics of the Invisible One.
All of this discovery, change, and revelation was occurring with its creative intensity amidst life’s difficulties and challenges. But that was the grace of it—I bathed in the beauty of this liquid light as it became more integrated into my body in the course of my regular, daily existence. It did not occur in a nunnery or monastery, cave, chapel, or temple—the venue was life itself, and the temple was me, us, everyone.
to simply be with anything that comes up; to be interested in what is there; to gather as much information as possible by letting things bubble up and feeling them; and to let go of any tendency to direct what might come next.
My subjective mind couldn’t hold up against the diamond’s bright discernment. It felt as though the top of my head had flown off, along with some very restricted views of “reality.” But no matter what I did or thought, the diamond remained unaffected. It was an indestructible presence for weeks.
When students would “fall into” a hole, we supported them to allow the accompanying feeling of emptiness and to understand what they had filled it with. If they were also willing to experience the pain of separation from the truth of Being, the specific true quality that had been lost would arise. That quality might be experienced, for example, as the direct and immediate sense of strength or of will or love or compassion or joy, rather than in the indirect, merely conceptual way of knowing these facets of our humanness as they come through the ego self.
As he adjusted to his new life circumstances, he struggled with how to reconcile his love for Marie and his growing desire “to be near God,” as he expressed it in his journal. He sometimes referred to God as the truth of Being, in whatever way it showed itself—beyond his own individual being. Sometimes he experienced himself in relation to and moving toward Being, truth, or True Nature; at other times, he was within the divine matrix, inseparable from it. In addition, since the arrival of the diamond knowledge with its stark impersonalness, he had been pondering the question of how to integrate the impersonal with the personal.
Hameed would often say, “Essence is the teacher.” It was so apparent when he was working with people how the presence came through him to respond to their queries. Qualities of essence arose with intelligent attunement and influenced his questions and his answers, giving them elegant precision. Boldness arose to challenge limits and provide the expansion needed to go beyond them. Tenderness met any exposed wounds, allowing the pain to be tolerated and understood, rather than being soothed away and eliminating the opportunity for growth and insight. The sturdy presence delivered the endurance to stay the course into the unknown.
His words were exceptionally efficient that evening—packed with substance. He was not talking about presence but rather speaking from it.
I listened and watched as he seemed to shape-shift from an unassuming thirty-something guy to a powerful conduit of wisdom, transporting the room and its inhabitants to some other realm.
Hameed did his best to convey how getting attached to wondrous states and subtly anticipating our next step based on what we have already experienced hinder our inquiry. He continued to encourage us in an ongoing process of discovery in which we let go of trying to achieve certain states or cultivate a particular experience. As we moved through the many awakenings that followed, we needed to hear that, because each time we became comfortable with some new state or a different experience of essence, we would be toppled off our posts.
On the short ride home, I asked him, “Where did the sad kid go…and the disgruntled guy with all those feelings?” “Oh, the feelings didn’t go anywhere. I noticed them once in a while, but that was not what was dominant for me. I felt strength by the time I arrived at Duncan’s house, and I think this helped me to separate from the internal images of others and myself. When I teach, presence takes the front seat. I could still feel the line of tension, but it opened somewhat, and I was much more aware of how immense the dark, peaceful presence is.” “Yeah,” I said, rolling my eyes, emphasizing the wow factor. “And powerful, too.” Onward down the few short blocks to home, the two intrepid explorers moved through the dark evening atmosphere with silent ease.
13 Labor and…
The black luminosity that created the backdrop for the entire evening appeared to have had an annihilating effect on everyone’s individual boundaries, and the room had become one powerful energy field. Almost psychedelic. I think I was frightened by it but hadn’t noticed yet.…
I assisted him to attend to and breathe into the places where his body was taut, in order to encourage receptivity from the guidance of my hands. Depending on what was needed, my hands would emit coolness, heat, energy, or some aspect of presence as I held various areas to support the unwinding of the messages inside Hameed. The particular essential quality or energy that…
June 30, 1979 Then she helped me to understand what’s happening in the left side of my body. She saw a baby, really an embryo, contentedly asleep inside a womb. The embryo seemed to be spiritual, otherworldly, with silver and gold colors. Around it were colors of red and blue. The fluid seemed like blood that nourished it. So it seems that my heart is pregnant with a new baby, and that is the reason for the continuing tensions. It seems that the full activation of the yellow latifa [which relates to the joy center as the “left wing of the heart”] will be the birth of this new baby. Also it seems there is a lot of psychological work required for this activation. It includes letting go of others…
Grappling with the questions of autonomy and love, pleasure and priorities, that had been circling in his psyche was sculpting him into a different type of maturity. Working the relational…
He goes on to describe the conflict between two impulses coming from different depths in him. One was his desire to know the truth of his experience and serve the truth in whatever way it guided him; the other was the desire to be validated, a need that every child wants a parent to meet in order to be himself and feel valued for who he is as he grows into being his own person. The inner baby of the heart of paradise was growing and would gestate in his heart for a few more weeks as these issues came into greater clarity and understanding. As for me, I had issues to investigate in the aftermath of our session. What was I holding on to so dearly? What was I so afraid to let go of?
This achievement was—and still is, in Hameed’s and my opinion—not to be shrugged off merely because more refined theories now hold sway. By the 1970s, object relations theories were all the rage in psychiatric circles. Margaret Mahler, in particular, added to our view.
Most notable were the merging love essence, the red essence, and the will quality. The merging love is the bonding elixir in the shared orbit of mother and infant. The red brings in the perception of differentiation and the strength needed to fuel the process of separation; and the authentic expression of will emerges to support the child to begin to stand on her own, apart from mother and father.
Now we could inquire from the perspective of essence into questions such as: Who are you? What am I in relation to what you are? Will love dissolve me? Can I love you and still be myself? If I am myself, will you still love me? Can I still remain myself if I am not willful? When I am in
reaction to you, whom do you remind me of? What is real, and what is a veil from my past that I have made you wear for me?
The veils were hidden in plain sight like filmy substances over the world. I discovered that any situation could tell me what I needed to know about myself and how I saw reality. Old relics were tossed up from an ancient heap in me. Their stories needed to be remembered, told, sorted out, and clarified. I tried to look and listen to myself more judiciously, surrendering to the felt recall of unfinished childhood relationships and family situations. This was an ongoing process that became increasingly fluid, subtle, and refined, with cycles of intensity and cycles of freedom.
For many people, that feeling of alienation or purposelessness—or just getting downright tired of everything and wondering what else there is—becomes an existential crisis. It can arise as a yearning for something more—for God or truth or ultimate meaning. The dissatisfaction or sense of something missing expresses itself in myriad ways; you may be able to identify when and how this came about for you. But when this world will not provide what you long for, and you begin to recognize that and feel it in your guts, you take the step of becoming a spiritual seeker.
Being of the world is ego. A being that is beyond the world but able to be within it, this is what a true person is—“in the world but not of it,” as the Sufis say. The true human being is the transcendent formlessness entering the world and expressing itself through the access route of individual consciousness as a personal presence.
This is the true autonomy of the Pearl: living undefined by others’ views and free of one’s own mental definitions of oneself. Hameed’s autonomy also brought in the answer to his haunting question about Henry. It became evident that it was time for him to separate and venture out on his own to follow his destiny.
Rather than the thick sweetness of the nectars of paradise, these elixirs were like crisp, refreshing beverages for the soul, issuing from the mountain streams of the effulgent heart of the universe.
at first I was only able to taste sweet, sour, and maybe spicy as the pleasant ones; or bitter, slimy-salty, rubbery, and plastic-y as variants of yuckiness. It took years to refine my palate while the “taste center,” on the left side of the Mobius at the end of the sternum, slowly developed.
The sweet orange-colored substance swirled around me and settled on my periphery, like a gleaming shawl of deliciousness melting the edges of the milky richness. I became a Creamsicle! Who knew? From then on, my favorite color was orange;
pleasure is innate to spirit—it is Being itself—and this rapturous awakening to the limitless wellspring of pure pleasure is uncaused by anything in the physical world. Think of it as the noncaloric optimization of spiritual wholeness. Ahhh!
the inner sweetness wasn’t about just feeling good or being bliss-ninnies; it was an awakening brought on by the intelligent heart of Being, appreciating and celebrating itself through our hearts. Our shared delight in the wondrous universe of discovery—this was the real bond of our friendship.
There is no substitute for the inner pleasure of Being. To know it sets us free from expecting the outer world to be the sole source of pleasure; at the same time, it makes external pleasures even more enjoyable because we aren’t grabbing on to the world and squeezing the life out of it.
As the baby begins to separate from Mother, he is also busy becoming an ego and separating from the source of Being. As he grows, the source of pleasure appears to stay with Mother but then moves on to other people, objects, and pleasing situations. The child’s orientation toward external pleasure is completed through the solidification of ego as separate from Being; hence, the source of pleasure continues to exist in the other. In order to reclaim the truth that the source of pleasure is an element of what he intrinsically is, the student needs to see through his outer directedness and understand how it was set in place.
As we unveiled its meaning, it changed into a structure that not only defends and protects the truth of Being but also grounds essence as it supports that truth through the ruthless assertion of the real. “The Citadel” became the new moniker of this fortress of truth. It is a diamond consciousness whose main qualities are the fortitude and the skillful means to support the personal life of Being—not based on ideals or beliefs but on what we know from experience to be true. In contrast with the ironclad defensive structure of ego, it does its work in us by revealing the wisdom of right living in service of essence.
The soft sweetness of Divine Love took us through some jarring turbulence. As our small flock—Hameed, Faisal, me, and a few unsuspecting students—took flight into boundless skies, we were confronted with earthbound trusses that were limiting our freedom. To cruise beyond Earth’s orbit, we had to deal with the darkest of feelings: beastly hatred, mistrust of God, and the pessimistic outlook of ego toward this underlying positivity we were now present to. Also, being in touch with the vast generous and regenerative nature of unlimited love highlighted the ego’s greed, avarice, possessiveness, and disharmony.
Our disconnection from the ground of love is the main source of agony, and we have ways to find our way back to it.
Being vulnerable is the watery way to Being because transparency in our individual consciousness in its sheer state is necessary for the consummation of the marriage of individual consciousness to its true nature. Defenselessness is threatening, even seems foolish, when all we want is to survive; for spiritual awakening, however, it is a necessity. Without total vulnerability and openness to essence, there is no essential development and no essential marriage and hence no possibility of attaining nonduality.
Defenselessness is threatening, even seems foolish, when all we want is to survive; for spiritual awakening, however, it is a necessity. Without total vulnerability and openness to essence, there is no essential development and no essential marriage and hence no possibility of attaining nonduality.
It was all and everything. Describing the transition from witness to the Supreme presence of all related how the nothingness opened up to reveal the fullness as its other side. Not as two distinct phenomenological discriminations exactly, but as two sides of the same thing. Being and nonbeing as one. Fullness as its front, and nothing, or the emptiness, as the back.
Because our teaching values the individual consciousness and living an ordinary life, it makes sense that the realization of our nature would occur in this way. The boundless dimensions of love, knowledge, awareness, dynamism, and emptiness therefore not only reflect the various facets of True Nature, they are the basis for the capacities of individual consciousness—such as awareness, knowing, feeling, and action.
The spacious fullness of presence progressed to a dense, vast spaciousness pregnant with diamond indestructibility. Further examination continued to reveal a sense of empty openness and presence at once—awake, luminous awareness inseparable from Being.
In the Diamond Approach, the Supreme is the dimension of direct knowing, or gnosis. This limpid clarity of awareness and inherent self-knowingness is called jnana in Sanskrit and is described as a “cognitive event that is recognized when experienced. It is knowledge inseparable from the total experience of reality, especially of a divine reality.”4 It is self-knowing, pure awareness, and Being, completely coemergent. Being that knows itself by being itself. It is also the basis of the cognitive capacity of mind at all levels.
When I looked out my window, I perceived everything as full, like an overstuffed couch, bursting forth with vivid Beingness.
March 14, 1983 I am everything. I am always like this and always will be. It is a matter of just waking up to the fact that this is me, always has been—a simple awareness that is there all the time because I am the very nature of everything. There is no separation between appearance or essence or nature. I am both and beyond.
I am pure Being. I know myself because I am myself. It is not an event. It is not an experience. I am nothing and nothing happened. I am happening all the time.
My schoolwork was fascinating, but the innocence of not-knowing, so important for curiosity to function most sharply, kept getting eclipsed. I had to continually review my orientation in order to hold my school knowledge lightly and as
a supportive guidance, rather than a determinant of how I viewed myself, other people, and the world.
But when I recognized that what I had experienced was the failure of a hypothesis, not a waste of time, I learned an important lesson: that awakening to essence is not what every individual needs or aspires to. Essence can fortify skill sets in all walks of life, in the right situation at the right time. However, what those kids needed was support to develop the most basic skills for functioning in their immediate environs.
We spread our wings and fluttered in the currents of the teachings. Some of us learned to soar gracefully through trial and many errors. We each found the niches where our skills could shine to benefit others.
The model of etiquette Hameed emphasizes is to not act out on negative emotions: “Feel it, don’t necessarily reveal it.”
By the end of a retreat, we were a field of thriving oneness, very like bees in a harmoniously functioning hive. Even the most basic accommodations were transformed into a palace through the sweet honey of Being.
I saw us as the rose window in a cathedral of Being, permeated by the rays of a numinous sun that casts no shadow.
I was beginning to feel like a set of Russian dolls. The vastness of Divine Love challenged the illusory boundary of our individual consciousness, while its cocoon of loving
goodness provided the holding support that eased us beyond the borders of our internal and external representational worlds.
unique wave in the ocean of humanity,
A fresh field of awareness, absent of concepts of any sort, permeated everything. We woke up to the underlying unity whose forms are made of a transparent clarity of awareness that is awake to itself. Because the capacity to differentiate is prior to the conceptual dichotomy that characterizes discrimination,
When I relaxed into the direct quality of pure awareness, I felt sheer, spontaneous happiness and delight.
“God needs the individual as much as the individual needs God.” The infinite and the finite meet as what we are. The soul is to the Logos what the eye is to the body: an organ of perception and experience.
do not look anywhere in the manifest world. If you want to find me, look for me in the hearts of my lovers.
The soul’s process was one of refinement and clarification on the journey of ascent, but when we reached the top of the mountain, we were under no illusion that all obscurations in the soul had been completely dispelled. We understood later, however, how important our experiences on the way up had been for tuning the soul and opening up the direction of the teaching to new realizations.
Sink into where you are as completely as possible and understand it with precision; this will reveal each subsequent layer, quality, or dimension of your nature. And each next step is your next step, not someone else’s and not toward an idea of where you think you should be. The perceived movement inward is actually your soul becoming more transparent to her inner nature, shifting you into new forms of experience.
All along the path of realization, we discover that each death is a loss of another layer of self, freeing us from limitations that block a greater realization of what we are. Each new facet of essential reality that is integrated into the soul fortifies the maturation of the Pearl further, making us a more complete human being by actualizing the truth of who we are.
Hameed and I hit another gap when our strong commitments to our marriages and managing the mushrooming demands of a growing school greatly reduced our availability for Inquiry practice together. Hameed insisted that it was going to take the two of us to unlock the crystal’s secrets, so we made the extra effort to make it possible.
The crystal showed us that it was not in the business of uncovering psychological issues but rather of revealing the limitations of our ontological and epistemological views—our basic notions of reality.
Every spiritual teaching has its view of reality that originates in and depends upon a particular kind of awakening. And each path is different in what it considers the final truth. The freedom of totality is that no reconciliation is needed between views that differ. The various states of realization are different ways that True Nature manifests. There are not many True Natures; True Nature is indivisible as well as ineffable.
Reality and consciousness are much more mysterious and rich than what can be experienced and known in any one realization, regardless of how comprehensive or liberating it is. There is no single, final, ultimate truth waiting to be discovered. Being keeps revealing new ways to experience and know reality; if we are not attached to finding some ultimate condition, we will have the privilege of experiencing truth in its endless display. Our curiosity, our heart’s wish to know the truth, and our willingness to surrender to the gift of where we are in this moment, with the unknown as our companion, will keep us completely open and open-ended. These qualities naturally set us on a path of unending discovery and runaway realization. Such was the impact of the quasar. The valence that had brought Hameed and me together when we exchanged our first smile and said our first hellos had once again manifested the right conditions to further the teaching, as it had done all along the way. Partnership, friendship, even relationship—all evaporated. What remained was one crystalship, continuing to peel back space-time to new realms of experience, in endless realization.
A mystery will keep its secrets no matter how much one says about it; and the riddles remain until the right conditions arise for them to be solved and their meaning can be apprehended by a soul seasoned to hear it.
The task of the entire organization is to discover how to best collect and store the honey of the teaching in the soul vessels of each member of the hive.