What emerged for the participants in this seminar—and, we hope, for the readers of this book—is the recognition that the bringing together of our animalistic impulses with the angelic sacredness of our spiritual nature in our human experience can contribute to the journey toward wholeness. We can live fully as physical beings on Earth, inseparable from knowing ourselves as the exalted transcendent truth of spirit. The integration of these levels of existence will allow us to experience the dynamic living presence of our spiritual nature pouring into the world, taking on form and living through that form as who we are in our uniqueness—all the while never stopping being the totality of all.
In the way we usually work, we use the mind’s discriminating capacity, the heart’s loving nature, and the body’s precious vehicle of life to go beyond all of these without leaving any of them behind. We do not emphasize one over the other, nor does deeper refinement through our work mean that we transcend these centers of our being; we simply see the natural potential hidden within them all. In the course of our spiritual maturation, each becomes more capable and more fully realized, not less. Thus we use the mind to go beyond the mind’s limitations; we use the capacity of discrimination to reveal subtler levels of mind. But here, the heart’s innate love for beauty and truth is a guiding principle: The marriage of heart and mind is a must on this spiritual journey, for it is the segmentation of our experience that keeps them limited and restricted to conventional reality. The love of truth allows the mind to open to new possibilities that mental logic alone cannot reveal or consider entering. And the heart can be clarified of its historical and emotional content through the mind’s clarity and precision, making available the energy liberated from the trapped structures of our personal history, so it can nurture and enliven our evolving spiritual development. This is the hidden tantra within the work of this path. The term “tantra” refers to teachings that use energy for the sake of evolving spiritual being. Energy can be erotic, even sexual, but energy can also be emotional, mental, or simply energy itself. In this seminar, we made explicit the ways in which newly unblocked and released energies can liberate the spirit and reveal deeper mysteries of relationship and love—whether with God, true nature, or another human being.
Both heart and mind are necessary for opening to truth—the deep desire to know the truth for its own sake and the love for the truth beyond all else. And as our practice of inquiry and meditation is refined over time, it becomes more obvious that the interdependence of mind and heart, and their integration through embodied experience, is vital for the revelation of our true being, for the wisdom of knowing and expressing its true nature.
What we wanted to explore during these days was how the energy and quality of love explicitly open the door to reality and to our deeper nature. The process of discovery in the group revealed that the portal is there for every human being to open; each of us can be fully real and alive in all our interactions. And the erotic, as it is felt and experienced in the body, is a part of that openness, whether it becomes sexual or not. For many reasons, eros has become separated from the pure and the holy, and as a result, it is usually relegated to the domain of the gross and unrefined. But eros is the energy of the divine. As such, it is always divine and pure.
One of the main tenets of the tantric approach as it is taught in our work is to feel whatever we are feeling in any given moment. It is not necessary to either act a feeling out or suppress it. We don’t try to change either our feelings or ourselves; instead, we let the energy change us. Not acting out an emotion will eventually lead to the pure energy within it. And understanding the charge that we carry about the feeling will allow the energy to be cleansed of the fixed content of the charged emotion from the past, leaving it pure and clean, simply itself. This energy opens us to the realm of Being where we experience the essence of our being as flowing, dynamic, alive, intelligent presence. Frequently, the liberated energy opens up to a dimension of experience where the explosive and dazzling pulsing thrill becomes foreground, manifesting as the fully alive energy of spirit and life. In this process, we see that the spiritual journey need not be a choice between the various parts of ourselves but, rather, through embracing the totality of our experience, the realization of a personal life of nonattachment without renunciation. Nothing has to be excluded. Then we can know ourselves as our unencumbered essence while enjoying a life of fulfillment.
When one has tasted freedom, there is a natural movement to share with others who may benefit from the gifts of what that freedom has revealed.
The practice of presence develops over time so that you also become aware of what is present and who is present. Who is the you that is present? What is the essence of your awareness? The practice of presence becomes an important and significant way of knowing our spiritual nature, of knowing and feeling the deeper dimensions of our Being. One of the specific practices of presence that we recommend is to sense your body. The body has many centers, and the main ones we work with in the Diamond Approach are the belly center, the heart center, and the head center. The core of the primal energies that make up our life force is located in the lower body, and the belly center is the organizing hub for all of these energies. The belly has an energetic center, an energetic spiritual center. It is located in the center of the belly about three fingers below the navel and, depending on the size of your belly, anywhere from two to five fingers inside. The Japanese call it the hara center and the Chinese call it t’an tien. We call this point the Kath, a term taken from a Central Asian tradition. The belly center is also the grounding center: Your consciousness is like a tree, and the roots of the tree are in the belly. So we will be referring to this center as both the Kath and the belly center. Because the belly center is related to the energies of the life force, we often have you sense your belly. As you become more aware of that area, and the belly center becomes more developed, more present, you become more in touch with the raw energies of your life force. Then you can better access what we call instinctual energy—the various energies of your survival, sexual, and social instincts.
The core of the primal energies that make up our life force is located in the lower body, and the belly center is the organizing hub for all of these energies. The belly has an energetic center, an energetic spiritual center. It is located in the center of the belly about three fingers below the navel and, depending on the size of your belly, anywhere from two to five fingers inside. The Japanese call it the hara center and the Chinese call it t’an tien. We call this point the Kath, a term taken from a Central Asian tradition. The belly center is also the grounding center: Your consciousness is like a tree, and the roots of the tree are in the belly. So we will be referring to this center as both the Kath and the belly center. Because the belly center is related to the energies of the life force, we often have you sense your belly. As you become more aware of that area, and the belly center becomes more developed, more present, you become more in touch with the raw energies of your life force. Then you can better access what we call instinctual energy—the various energies of your survival, sexual, and social instincts.
will help you connect to divine eros, so that you become both eros and divine. [Readers are invited to do the Kath meditation (the belly meditation) on their own for twenty minutes daily and in conjunction with reading each chapter of The Power of Divine Eros. Exploring this practice as well as other meditations and practices that are described in this book will help to unfold your own experience as you grow in the awareness of divine eros.—Ed.]
THE KATH MEDITATION The Kath meditation is usually done in a sitting position. Using a chair is fine, but any other means of keeping your back straight is okay, too. The mudra (Sanskrit for “hand posture”) for this meditation looks like the Taoist yin/yang symbol, with the right hand holding the left hand, the fingers of one hand nesting in the other. This is called a mudra of containment, because it helps you contain your energy within so that it concentrates and can develop and strengthen. For this meditation, it is best to have the eyes closed. Your mouth can be slightly open or closed, and it is good to have your tongue touching the roof of your mouth, the upper palate. Begin by paying attention to your breathing. Most people breathe in their chest, but in this meditation you will be breathing in the belly. As you breathe, feel your belly, sense it, as though you were touching it from the inside. With each breath, the belly expands, and as you exhale, the belly gets smaller again. You don’t have to take big or deep breaths; just be aware that there is breathing in the belly. As you become aware of breathing in the belly, begin to concentrate your mind—which means concentrate your awareness, concentrate your attention—at the center of the belly. When you concentrate your attention at that center in the belly, you will not find anything in particular. This meditation is simply a concentration of…
If you get distracted, if you forget, if you become lost in thoughts or memories or planning—just bring your attention back to the center of the belly the moment you become aware that you’ve lost your focus. You don’t punish yourself. It is a practice, a skill you learn, so of course you don’t get it the first time. You are not used to focusing your mind in one place without your concentration being broken, so while you are still new at this, it will be broken over and over again.
In the Diamond Approach, our orientation is not toward having spiritual experiences. In fact, we are not interested in having any particular type of experience at all. We are interested in actualizing our potential. This means realizing who we are, discovering what the essence of our Being is, continuing to recognize this, continuing being what we are—our spiritual presence, our true nature—and learning how to live as that. It is a profound, meaningful way of living.
At a certain point, you realize that what you are is not different from recognizing the nature of your awareness, the nature of your consciousness. It is what you are. It is the essence of your Being. And the essence or nature of what we are can express itself in what we call spiritual qualities, or spiritual forms, or different kinds of subtle energies.
Divine eros refers to a particular quality, a particular energy, a particular way of experiencing the nature of our consciousness. At the same time, it is a way of experiencing, feeling, and knowing our consciousness that becomes significant for being open to the depth of our nature.
We want to live as fully and as completely as possible. We are living life anyway, and we might as well live it well. To live it well means more than just eating well or exercising well. It means being completely and authentically ourselves, whether we are eating or riding our bicycle or interacting with another human being.
But we want to learn how to experience a particular kind of spiritual condition—the experience of a purely spiritual presence that is, at the same time, the very nature of eros. That presence, that condition, is completely pure, completely spiritual, in the sense that it has no ego, no self-centeredness, no conditioning. This is what we call divine. At the same time, we want to see how it is actually quite erotic. We are going to be using the word “divine” in a way that may be a little different than some of you are imagining. The word “divine” is usually connected with God. But people use the word “God” to mean other things as well. For some, “God” means simply the purity and the exquisiteness of the spiritual nature. So instead of saying that something is godly, we will say that it is divine, to make a little distinction, a little difference. When the word “divine” is used in this teaching, we mean pure egolessness. “Divine” is, in a profound sense, beyond this world; it comes from beyond the physical world as we ordinarily know it. It is not physical and it is not emotional. It is not mental. It’s spiritual—but not otherworldly. It is spiritual and without ego. When we use the word “divine,” we also mean something that is subtle. It is refined. We say that it is pure, pure in the sense that it doesn’t contain other things in it. It doesn’t include our past and our beliefs or our ideas about it. It is our nature that is not touched or contaminated by, not mixed with, our history, our associations, our culture, our preferences or ideas. It is completely pure as simply itself.
When the word “divine” is used in this teaching, we mean pure egolessness. “Divine” is, in a profound sense, beyond this world; it comes from beyond the physical world as we ordinarily know it. It is not physical and it is not emotional. It is not mental. It’s spiritual—but not otherworldly. It is spiritual and without ego. When we use the word “divine,” we also mean something that is subtle. It is refined. We say that it is pure, pure in the sense that it doesn’t contain other things in it. It doesn’t include our past and our beliefs or our ideas about it. It is our nature that is not touched or contaminated by, not mixed with, our history, our associations, our culture, our preferences or ideas. It is completely pure as simply itself.
There can be a sense of beauty when we use the word “divine,” a sense of exquisiteness, a sense of gracefulness, a sense of magnificence, a sense of heartfulness, a sense of…
Our heart feels the purity of love, a love that is big, unrestricted, and not self-centered. It is a love that is completely generous, totally giving. That is why divine eros brings out a selfless tenderness in us, an egoless sweetness, a generosity and appreciation that is not…
We all have a way of experiencing love to one degree or another, at one level or another. We all know the experience of the love that is not “I love this so I am attached to it” but rather love in the sense of giving, of appreciating, of truly recognizing what we love, seeing it for what it is, and experiencing a pleasurable appreciation of it. So when you really love somebody, you are happy to see that person not because it gives you something, but because you see who he or she is—and it is wonderful,…
One of the main polarities that controls or patterns our lives is the polarity between this open-hearted lovingness on the one hand and, on the other, this wanting, this desire and need, to have something, possess something, get something, which makes love more self-oriented and self-centered. Most spiritual teachings take the position that spirituality is more about pure lovingness and does not have much to do with desire, with wanting, with passion; desire, wanting, and passion are not seen as spiritual. The concern is that engaging in desire, wanting, and passion will take you more into the world, into the mundane, into the physical, and into egoic life. This position is taken because for most people, that is exactly what happens. It is difficult to think of wanting something without wanting it for oneself. We naturally tend to experience wanting—especially strong desire, passionate wanting—in a way that is more focused on the self, that has a self-centeredness to it. So we end up having two forces, two tendencies, two manifestations, in our consciousness and in our experience: giving, open, generous love on one hand, and wanting, desire, passion on the other. And these frequently appear to be in opposition to one another. In fact, most people experience them as…
most human beings have difficulty with that view because to them it means that they have to become some kind of saint: “I’m not sure that becoming free that way is for me. Who wants to be a saint? They don’t have much of a life. They’re always generous, always giving, and do nothing for themselves. Not only don’t you have much of a life, there’s not even a thought of having an erotic life!” We will be exploring how to be passionate and to feel a…
But a long, long time ago, these two forces were not separate. At a time we cannot remember, they were one. And the interesting thing is that they are still one—but they are one in eternity. What does this mean: “one in eternity”? It means that the two are one in the timelessness of our true nature, in the depth of our spiritual nature. The two are inseparable, primordially inseparable.
They are the same thing—they are one force. And it is possible to have that kind of experience, that kind of recognition, because it is so: It is—they are—one. If we look into the nature of that primordial oneness, we will be able to say that this is the case. “Primordial existence” means that something exists beyond our usual condition, beyond our ordinary mental condition of time and space, beyond our conventional categories of experience. “Primordial” means that something is originally so, it is fundamentally the case, but also that it is the case all the time, not only long ago. It is true that a long time ago, the two were one, but that oneness of long ago survives now as well. But it survives now primordially, meaning that it is in the origin of our experience. Our experience right now has an origin, has a depth, has a source, but not in terms of time. That is why I use the term “eternally,” which is the equivalent of “at this moment.” And “this moment” is beyond the time continuum, which means that it is the very now-ness of our experience. I use words that sometimes are difficult to understand, such as “primordial” or “eternal”; but they have very specific, clear, definite meanings. “Eternally” doesn’t mean “a long time in the future.” It means “all time,” because it is the now of all time. It is the source of time, before we think of time; it is what is now. In that primordial place—the fundamental condition of our awareness that is beyond our history, beyond our thinking of time in terms of past and future—when we go to the essence of our consciousness (which we can know only right now, in the very moment of our being), it is possible to see and to experience that passion and selfless love are the same.
One is the belief of many people on the spiritual path, who, as we have seen, take these to be two separate forces, two opposite experiences: “I have a lot of conflict in my life because I want to be realized, I want to be free, and I don’t understand how this realm of wanting and desires, needs, passion, and intensity fits with that.” The erotic is but one of these manifestations of instinctual energy. “Divine eros” means that there is a pleasurable experience that has desire, wanting, and passion in it and, at the same time, is totally loving—it is completely love, selflessness, and purity.
Inquiry means that we learn to be spiritual not by pushing away our ordinary experience but by embracing and feeling it more completely than we usually do. In fact, being spiritual includes experiencing ourselves and being in touch with our experience as completely as possible because, generally speaking, most of us don’t experience ourselves completely. There are limitations, restrictions, on how we normally experience things and how we experience ourselves, including our thoughts, emotions, sensations, tendencies, desires. If we experience all of these fully, and if we really understand them, then we will see that they are the manifestations of our spiritual nature. They themselves will take us across the great divide; they themselves will become windows and entryways into the primordial ground, into eternity. In our orientation here, we do not throw away anything, we do not push away anything, and we do not try to get rid of anything. We always embrace our experience completely, as completely as possible.
Inquiry means being aware of our experience, being present in it, feeling it as completely as possible, and at the same time having a curious mind about it. To inquire is to be interested in not only asking “What am I experiencing?” but also wanting to know “What does it mean? What is it about? Why do I feel this way? What makes me experience this feeling or this emotion or this sensation, or these thoughts? Why am I thinking that way?”
Sometimes it is difficult for us to be present, or difficult for us to feel what we are feeling, because there might be fear. “I don’t want to fully feel my belly because if I feel it, I will see how scared I am… and I am scared because it’s possible that I might be losing my job.” When you recognize that you are a little agitated because you are scared that you might lose your job, we call that understanding. But that understanding is not just thoughts in your mind; it includes the totality of your experience. As you come to understand the fullness of what you are experiencing, you calm down and you feel a different kind of state. The understanding brings more light, more clarity, more illumination to the experience, and that naturally changes it. It is transformed. So instead of feeling, “I am scared, and it’s because I might lose my job,” you now start feeling that you are really angry: “Why are they going to fire me? I have been doing such a good job!” So things proceed from feeling agitated to feeling afraid to feeling angry. There is nothing unusual about this progression, but if we are not aware of it, if we don’t understand the relationship between all of these feelings, we tend to be unsettled inside. That is because we are not fully in touch with our experience.
Because your father didn’t recognize that you were doing a good job, and because whatever you did was never enough for him, then whenever there is the slightest indication—even decades later—that somebody is not recognizing your good work, you believe that they are going to be disappointed in you, or even that they are not going to like you. If you go further and explore the question “Why do I care whether or not my father sees what I’m doing?” you could begin to feel after a while, “Because he is my father. I love him and it was important that he love me.” And if you allow that recognition, you might start feeling love—and before you know it you turn into a pink rose. “That’s interesting—I’m a pink rose… smells very nice.” And all these petals are opening and unfolding. So what started out as an irritation ended in a spiritual experience. That is actually how our consciousness works. If you understand it, it opens up. If you don’t understand it, it stays the same.
We want to do an exercise now, an inquiry that is based on this principle of open and curious exploration. When you are doing an inquiry on any topic, alone or with others, you might find certain tendencies within yourself—for example, you could think that there is something wrong with you, or you may want to find fault with yourself or feel bad about yourself. It is important that you look into your experience not from the perspective of thinking that it is good or bad, nor from the perspective of judging it or criticizing yourself, nor from the perspective of finding fault with your experience. You simply want to understand it. You want to discover the truth that is in it. If you find yourself with these tendencies, just become aware of them and include them in the inquiry, without getting identified with them. Be more of an explorer. You are not to be a judge. You really just want to find out. When you do a practice with others and a discussion at the end is suggested, as much as possible you want to have that same attitude of being open and exploring together. You want to be as mature and open as you can, both with yourself and with others. If everyone takes the attitude of genuinely wanting to explore, of really loving discovering what the truth is and wanting understanding, it is easier to deal with those tendencies.
EXPLORATION SESSION This exploration will help reveal how you experience the opposition or conflict between the selfless giving of love and the passionate wanting, the two forces discussed earlier. Spend fifteen to twenty minutes considering these questions. If you are doing this exercise alone, you may want to write them down in a journal and respond in writing. 1. How do you experience the selfless giving of love? 2. How do you experience passionate wanting? 3. How do you experience the relationship of the two in your life, in your experience? 4. How do you experience the opposition, the…
So when we are in the vastness of the ocean of consciousness, the experience of reality feels transcendent. But we might feel that we are missing something if we don’t have relationships. If we’re not sharing with another person, we start missing that. How often have you gone on a spiritual retreat and sat for a week, or have gone walking in nature and had an epiphany, and find that you can’t wait to go tell your friend what happened? There is something about sharing it, about saying it, about expressing it. There is something about letting other people know that a wonderful thing happened. This thing that happened to you, you want them to know it, too.
We are in touch with the underlying presence of love, which has the feeling of an actual presence of light and fullness. It’s almost physical, like a pooling or a liquid, soft presence.
Presence is our spiritual freedom liquefied, condensed. Presence is an actual sense of here-ness—beyond our emotions, beyond the mind, beyond our ideas. In presence, we can know ourselves in a way that is authentic, which means that we are knowing what is real in us. When we feel presence, we are experiencing our underlying reality. It feels more real than the physical, the emotional, or the mental realms of experience. And it can’t be defined in any of those terms. So when we feel the presence of love—the actual liquid sweetness and its melting nature, or its fullness and richness and softness—we begin to see that the ways we have known love have been limited.
In this place, the heart is not divided.
Because we have notions and associations about love, we keep our heart valve mostly turned off and only let our love occasionally trickle through. But if we follow those dribbles back to that big vein, that mother lode, it is natural for our heart to open and flow.
the heart is capable of hugging someone without their even knowing it.
When following rules does not emerge from an inner alignment with truth, the will of the superego gets confused with the will of God.
but they can be quite limited in other ways. While offering beliefs and guidance for living, they don’t generally provide teachings of the total view of reality from which the guidance springs, so the experience of the underlying richness is limited at best.
We recommend that you listen to the second movement (“Adagio molto expressivo”) of Beethoven’s Spring Sonata if it is available. If it is not, choose a piece of music that you know tends to evoke the experience, the presence, of love in you; it just needs to be a type of music that you think will provide a space for that opening. After you put the music on, and are settled comfortably, start the exercise by visualizing a golden liquid dribbling down on you and descending into your head. From there, see it melting and collecting in a golden chalice in your chest. This golden fluid that is filling your chest now is sweet, rich, nourishing. It feels soft and full and sweet, like honey but not sticky. As this is happening, allow yourself to breathe into your belly. Be present in your belly. Developing the belly center will make the experience of this meditation more than just visual; you will actually sense and feel this subtle substance from inside yourself.
FINDING THE INVISIBLE WORLD There is a Zen saying that describes the primary stages of the path: “First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is a mountain.” The second mountain is very different from the first mountain, however, because we have traveled the whole path. It is the same mountain, yet we experience it, and the whole of realty, in a totally new way. Zen practitioners do things such as koan
practice and zazen, sitting meditation. Although we engage in meditations of various kinds, our main practice in the Diamond Approach is inquiry into ordinary experience. When we inquire into our ordinary experience, we see that it contains things that are of the first mountain. Ordinary experience says that there is a mountain, there is me, there is you, there is the world. And all of this is seen from the ordinary perspective: There is this mountain and that other mountain—all these mountains, just as there are all these people and all these things. Everything is actually seen from an isolated, mental perspective, a perspective that views reality as being composed of many things. And we tend to see this many-ness of things in terms of divisions and polarities. Exploring the divisions within our experience and understanding how they become separated into opposing sectors can be a rich inquiry. Understanding the opposition, the conflict, and the polarity will resolve to an underlying truth, which is the second mountain. But in the process, dissolution occurs. There is loss, there is annihilation of whatever it is we are exploring—and that is true about anything we explore in our personal experience. This is the state of no mountain. If we fully explore any of our experiences, any of the objects of our experience, any of the content of our experience, in order to understand it as completely as possible, at some point the process will reveal things that we don’t see at the beginning. The process begins to reveal the invisible world, the world that we don’t see with our senses, with our ordinary eyes. This will feel like a loss, but through the loss a discovery is uncovered.
People who are near death sometimes begin to see how much they love life, how much they love the world, how much they love very simple things. To be able to get up and take a shower is wonderful. You don’t want to lose that… just feeling the water running over your body. Normally, you don’t tend to notice that; you just take a shower every morning and put on your clothes and run. But when you are about to die, you think, “Oh, am I never going to have a shower again?” and you recognize how
At the same time, we have another love. Many people in the world are not aware of this other love. They are only living out their love, their attraction to and their need for the world. But when somebody becomes more mature or sensitive, the conventional world is no longer enough. The life of the world, regardless of how much we love it, feels incomplete at some point.
Many spiritual teachings say, “Let’s forget
about the world. The world will not bring freedom, won’t bring true fulfillment. Let’s move deeper or higher; let’s go into the other world.” That perspective points to the value of spiritual work, spiritual realization and enlightenment. Yet it is one-sided, dividing world from spirit.
The deeper we go into the spiritual ground, the more we feel we are losing things in the world. And we assume that we have to let go of our attachments. We think we need to release our attachment to our bodies, to other people’s bodies. We have to let go of our attachments to our cars, our homes, our mobile phones—all the things we love and enjoy. We feel that we have to give up many things we love, and many spiritual traditions support that: “Yes, you have to surrender these things; they should not be that important to you. The spiritual, God, buddha nature—these are what bring true freedom, true happiness.” Many people who manage to experience the vastness, the depth, the infinity, the eternity of our nature and its miraculousness and mystery, can feel at some point that the world and everything in it is not important. You might have experiences that the world is all gone—this is the stage of no mountain.
The extreme expression of that is to go into a monastery and forget about the world. On the other hand, if we emphasize the world and our relationships in it at the expense of spiritual depth, spiritual truth, then after a while even the most beautiful intimate relationship begins to be empty and meaningless and will create more suffering.
One is the physical world—the everyday world of me, you, everybody else; the houses, cars, planets, and galaxies. The other is the world of spirit, the world of mystery—the unseen, invisible world, the world of total harmony, the world of purity, of pure light, pure radiance, perfect presence, the world of the divine. For a long time throughout the inner journey, we tend to think that there are two kinds of experience, as if there were two realities, two worlds.
Every thought we think, every feeling we feel, every action we take implies the position we hold about this world and the ways we perceive it. For most people, nothing else exists beyond the visible; there is only this world, and you try to survive and make the best of it. Those who are involved in spiritual practice usually think there is more than what appears to us as physical reality. Regardless of what we believe, including our notions of nonduality or unity, we still think and behave as if there were two worlds. And this belief splits our heart in two, so that we end up with two loves. We love the world, but we also love spiritual freedom—we love the spirit and its harmony, its blissfulness, its sanctity, its majesty and beauty.
When we see the second mountain, our heart is unified. We don’t have two loves. We have only one love—because there is only one reality.
But at the very depth of our heart, we love reality. We love the real, and the real is the unity of the outer and the inner, of your body and your soul, of the world and God, of the ordinary universe and the spiritual universe. These are like the front and the back of the same reality. This world is nothing but the front of reality. The spirit is the back of this reality. And you can’t take the back away from the front. It doesn’t work, for the front will always have a back, which is the spiritual nature.
But when you recognize the second mountain and why it is said, “… and then there is a mountain,” this is all that needs to be said, because the distance between spirit—that luminosity, that purity, that absolute brilliant clarity—and your body and the visible world is zero.
Everything that you see—the physical bodies present, the clothes people are wearing, the walls and the ceiling—begins to glitter and to shine with an inner radiance. All of it becomes self-illuminating jewels—jewels of light that are, at the same time, beauty and love and tenderness and consciousness. But we normally don’t see it that way because we have this deep belief in separation.
So the true perspective is that we opened a little window and looked, and we saw the light—“Oh, it’s brilliant, beautiful, intoxicating, pleasurable”—but actually nothing new happened. It’s just that our perception changed. Even so, we are afraid to open the window completely and leave it open, because it will mean not only that the “I” disappears—it means the whole world will disappear. And we don’t want it to disappear, because we love it; we are totally in love with it. We don’t understand that we won’t lose it. Why won’t we lose it? Because this love we feel is the same as the love of no mountain. We don’t see that it is the love of looking through the window and seeing empty space—beautiful, totally peaceful… nothing has happened, nothing ever happens—yet completely silent, no disturbance whatsoever—like before the Big Bang. But if you stay a little longer and keep looking, letting your love guide you, letting your heart guide you, you will see at some point that the silence—that quiet, peaceful luminosity, the space before the Big Bang—is still here. It hasn’t disappeared. We simply were too busy with the material outcome of the Big Bang. We got occupied with all that was created. Our senses became focused on all of the things of the world, and we forgot to look at what is within them, within the space where all the activity happens. Spirituality, at least in the Diamond Approach, means recognizing the true condition of reality and understanding through experience that it is much more mysterious than we think. The true condition of reality is that the physical and the spiritual are the same thing, yet this does not mean they are identical. The mountain comes back again. It is the same mountain; nothing changes in it, yet it has become God’s appearance. Look at the mountain—you don’t see the burning bush, you just see God. That mountain is God… but it is also the mountain. Which one do you love? You don’t have to decide, because they are the same.
Spirituality, at least in the Diamond Approach, means recognizing the true condition of reality and understanding through experience that it is much more mysterious than we think. The true condition of reality is that the physical and the spiritual are the same thing, yet this does not mean they are identical. The mountain comes back again. It is the same mountain; nothing changes in it, yet it has become God’s appearance. Look at the mountain—you don’t see the burning bush, you just see God. That mountain is God… but it is also the mountain. Which one do you love? You don’t have to decide, because they are the same.
The more we see the true nature of reality, the more we recognize that the division in our heart is a by-product of our own belief, our own position about reality. However, our heart is primordially, originally, timelessly, and eternally undivided.
Ideally, spiritual life is all of our life. Nothing is excluded. If something is excluded, that means we are misunderstanding what spiritual life is. Spiritual life is not just going to church, not just meditating, not just having some wonderful inner experiences. It is living in reality—being what we truly are and living in the world as it is. This is possible for us. It is our potential. Of course we want to recognize the spiritual world, but the greater potential is to recognize that the spiritual world is not separate from this physical world. The spiritual world is the light of this world, the true nature of this world, the true existence of this world—which means that it is your true existence. When you experience yourself right now, when you feel yourself right now—if you feel yourself completely—you will feel yourself as wonderful, amazing, a luminous presence.
Some of your experience may even be nondual, but most of the time, and for most people, it is dualistic: me and my spirit, me and presence, me and you—all of these are dualities. By exploring how you experience things, you want to uncover your conviction of duality by identifying the underlying belief that makes you see things that way. What is your fundamental position? You want to see if you can find that.
Hameed: I get it… for you to be intimate with other people, your body had to disappear. Student: Yet it was not my usual body anymore; it was totally peaceful, totally clear, totally natural. Hameed: That is what we are: clear, peaceful, and natural. When we are truly ourselves, that is how it is. Student: I wonder whether this is what you meant by “the second mountain.” I was dealing with all these dichotomies, and then the slice of bread that I was chewing on… and then the slice of bread is chewed on. Then the mountain. All these pictures of me are gone—and suddenly that whole reality is one mountain for me. I am transparent. Hameed: That is what happens. When you become transparent, there is only one reality, not many. It is a very good perception to realize how reality is. When we are truly ourselves, and completely transparent, everything becomes one thing, an indivisible reality. Student: It is so sobering. Hameed: The sobriety is a good sign because it means you are clear about the situation, recognizing things, seeing the truth instead of just being excited about it. You are seeing it, and it makes you sober. It wakes you up. That is why we call it awakening—you wake up to how things are. It’s an interesting thing. It feels as if your body is disappearing, even though it is chewing the bread. When you become one with the piece of bread, you are transparent and the bread is transparent. And you have become one with it in more than one way—it’s both physical and nonphysical. So life can be very interesting that way. Just see how it can be: You could be riding your bicycle later and wonder who is riding. The bicycle will be ridden, in the same way as you said, “The bread is being chewed.”
Student: I shared a time, which has often come back to me, when I had a sense of oneness. During the feedback, my exercise partners had to remind me of that sense of oneness. After they pointed it out, I noticed as I was walking down the stairs during the break that my wonderful superego—or in my case, the inner committee—immediately started to evaluate it. It started to say, “What you were talking about… is it good enough?” Once again, this ego of mine doesn’t want to acknowledge this oneness and this unity. It wants to pull me back into duality. Hameed: Of course. Student: It really pisses me off. Hameed: I’m glad it pisses you off—that’s good. So when you get pissed off, right now, what happens? How do you experience yourself? You recognize that you are pissed off about this committee trying to evaluate your experience. Obliterate the committee, and what will be left? Student: That is the problem. If the inner committee goes, there is nothing left of the ego. Hameed: What is left now that you are pissed at the committee? Student: Fear. I don’t like to trust my gut instincts. Hameed: It is important to recognize that fear is there. Maybe this is what brings back the committee—to protect you from that fear. The committee believes it is protecting you.
Hameed: Very good… I listen. One step at a time for all of us, because when we feel those fears, they are really strong. They control our experience in a big way. Even though, in reality, there is nothing to be afraid of about stepping off that cliff, we still have much fear. As a result, there’s a lot of conflict and difficulty and, as you said, committees deliberating what is real and what is not real, what is good and what is not good. Many teachings do not deal with this dimension of difficulties; they use yogic techniques of concentration, prayer, or even philosophy to get to the second mountain, without going through these difficulties. But the problems will remain and will resurface during the course of daily life. Therefore, in the Diamond Approach, we deal with such difficulties in ordinary experience, and these actually become doorways to the second mountain.
Hameed: I know. You hold on for dear life. It is deeply instinctual. It is an animal instinct to hold on in order to keep your body and your world from disappearing. But remember the Zen saying: First there is a mountain, and then there is no mountain, then there is a mountain. “No mountain” is a stage. Hearing this might give you a little bit of comfort, but it is usually not enough. You have to feel the fear. But it is okay to feel the fear, to embrace it, because here we inquire into everything, all of our ordinary experience. And it is part of our normal experience to feel that kind of fear, the fear of losing the boundaries.
Hameed: You don’t believe it. Yes, reality is difficult to understand. That’s what happens when we see that the spirit is the back of reality. Reality is always in motion, always in movement; a lot is happening, but reality, the spirit part, is very still. It is just like deep space. And the two are completely inseparable, which is why you can talk while you are still.
Depending on how we approach our awakening to new realms, we can either expand our ego self or be transformed to express a whole new level of existence. Transformation requires that we learn how to meet and invite this alchemical process through being with and understanding experience. This will allow it to express its own intelligent unfolding.
Most of us think of desire as being always for something outside us, so it is difficult to imagine desire without it being focused on an object. Take the situation of falling in love. As long as our experience of desire is attached to another person or situation, we believe that love itself is dependent on the outside. Unless our love is liberated from this attachment, our full potential to love—which is present in us whether we are relating to another person or not—cannot reveal itself to us. But we will never reach that freedom unless we first allow ourselves to completely feel our wanting as it is. And the ego has a hard time doing that.
From the limited perspective of the ego, reality is separated from the presence of our natural condition of consciousness, which is a sense of sufficiency, fullness, and presence. For the ego, wanting and desiring always imply an inherent lack, a feeling that something is missing in oneself that perhaps another will satisfy. We have already spent some time looking at love—its richness and depth, and how it is ever flowing and ever present.
This is how we play games and manipulate, control, and restrict ourselves with regard to neediness, love, or desire. The stronger the force of desire, the more our associated feelings and resistances come into play. But the main source of difficulty is not the way we manage our experience consciously; it is the unconsciousness of our conditioned self. When we allow ourselves to fully experience our wanting, and we trust that the wanting itself has the intelligence to reveal the pure energy of desire that underlies it, we get a taste of what it’s like to feel love and desire as a unified force.
order to move through this experience of emptiness into a true fullness of love, we need to better understand how the ego keeps us disconnected from our true nature. So let’s go deeper in our exploration of the experience of emptiness and how it can lead us to true eros.
Exploring Deficient Emptiness
You are fully alive with an energetic, bubbling, sparkling, effulgent wanting: “Oh my God, this feels really good. I feel alive. I am finally letting myself feel this thing that I haven’t let myself feel since the day that person rejected me… or the time when this thing didn’t happen… or the day I was so disappointed when I didn’t get that thing I worked so hard for.” If you keep allowing that feeling, the focus on the outer drops away and you are able to feel the feeling of pure desire itself. Desire has a bubbling, energetic quality that has a fullness to it, a full, dynamic feeling. It is sparkling, bright, tingly, effervescent.
Desire becomes a moving out of yourself toward what you love. The love you feel is overflowing, and now it is also full and sweet. All of the possibilities and potentials of being in touch with your own energy allow the love to flower. The love fills out the desire with itself.
Spend ten or fifteen minutes contemplating each of the following questions, using the directions below as a guide. Each question has a logic that leads to the next, so it is important to ask and respond to them in order. 1. What limits your experience of desire? 2. What is something that you desire? 3. What do you like about desiring?
However, if you actually feel the energy of desire, then whether or not there is a lack, the desire can lead you to the underlying energy itself, which isn’t based in lack. That is what I was trying to say—desire is part of the natural flow of the energy of life. We can have a desire that is dissociated from our ground of presence, which is when we feel a lack and are unhappy about it, so we desire something to fix it, change it, or fill it. But if we allow the energy of that desire and follow it to its source, we can feel that this energy actually arises from something that is sufficient, that is truly a fullness. In recognizing the energetic source of desire, we feel it mixed with love.
Karen: Thank yourself; it is your discovery. It is good that you were open but didn’t believe me, and you found out for yourself.
As part of our human potential, we can be completely transparent, like air; a feeling or inner experience can arise in a completely free way, totally unimpeded, unrestricted, undistorted.
If we don’t allow ourselves to experience a feeling, we are saying no to that part of our experience; and if we say no, we are not free; we are not transparent, and we don’t experience the luminosity, the light of our spiritual nature.
Our spiritual realization is more complete when we bring our realization, our presence, our compassion, our clarity and understanding into interaction with others. This includes how we talk with one another, how we respond, how we touch, how we allow ourselves to be touched, what we do and don’t do and how and when we do it, so that our life with other people can express the inner freedom we have attained.
Freedom does not mean just that we feel light, happy, and free. That is wonderful, but it is only the beginning of inner freedom, of enlightenment, of realization.
Learning what it means to be a real person is a process of unfoldment and transformation. It is not something you fall into or recognize all of a sudden, as it sometimes can be in the discovery of or awakening to true nature. It is a maturational process. And it begins with being honest, truthful, and real about where you are and investigating that. Every moment holds the possibility of more realness and more in-touchness with the presence of essential Being.
“We are actually elephants trying to be butterflies.” And right after that, he said, “We are actually butterflies trying to be elephants.” The first statement reflects our belief that our earthbound self is a heavy, solid mass rather than the luminous colorful beauty of the liberated lightness of Being that we long to be. The second describes our forgotten lightness, as we become a worldly creature and take a more substantial form. Sadly, both statements reflect the unsatisfying existence of most human beings.
Being arises in forms, birthing itself into existence. One of those forms is the human one, that of you and me, and that form changes all throughout life until it is shed, perhaps for other forms.
Yet, from the realized point of view, all experiences, including the physical, are just waves in the ocean. From our limited view, spiritual experiences are miracles that come from some other, invisible dimension, but when we know the ocean—when we know reality directly and fully—we see how much more fundamentally real it is. This exposes the flimsiness of the ideas we have and reveals the truth that the individual consciousness is actually a personal expression of a vast ocean of reality. But to the person who is truncated from her essential ground, it seems like a miracle: “Oh, I had this opening… this amazing presence of light came, and I felt so wonderful…” We believe that it was an unusual event, that it was something other than what we are.
When the wave knows that the ocean is the source, this is realization. When the wave feels the ocean and experiences the wetness without knowing it and recognizing it, this is a spiritual experience that remains unexplainable, unknown, and unrealized. It is still part of the dream. It is not yet an awakening.
For example, a sphere moving through a two-dimensional plane would show itself first as a dot, then as a circle getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and then at some point, starting to get smaller and smaller and smaller. The last experience of it would be a point of contact where the sphere still touches the plane as it passes through. So we might think we’ve had a visitation from God: “Honey, I saw it again today. There was this thing that appeared, and it got bigger and bigger and then smaller and smaller… and then it was gone, just the way it came! It was an amazing presence rippling through.” That would seem to be a miracle.
really is a sphere. It looks totally different than I thought. I never could have imagined… I thought a sphere did not feel like anything… but no, you can actually touch it. It’s round and you can put your arms around it.” You can grasp that that dimension is real, and this realization opens you up to a whole new realm of experience.
The sensitive field of the human being, which is a wave of the ocean of consciousness, is conscious beyond our physical body. We are a medium of aware and vibrant sensitivity, which is impressionable and usually patterned by our previous experiences. When we awaken to our nature, our experience changes. The new ways we experience ourselves challenge the old forms we have taken ourselves to be; we change into new forms and into formless realms of our nature as well.
It is an evolution of two waves of consciousness interacting and interweaving as one field of consciousness, shifting form through the interchange. This is the relational field as a living medium. What does it mean to have a real relationship? What does it mean to come together and not be defining your friend, partner, wife, by the experiences you had of them last week? What would it mean to actually see, with fresh eyes, who they are right now? This doesn’t mean that you forget what has happened, who they are, or what their name is.
In this understanding, true relationship supports both people to access their spiritual nature more easily, and it is also a place to express it, to live it. You can definitely express your spiritual nature freely with your dog or your parrot. But it is more satisfying to express it with another human being, in the sense that what you express will be more complete, more total. And it can be reciprocated in kind.
In other words, a true relationship is one that helps us to discover reality.
An energizing dynamic can occur when two forces are interacting with each other—two souls, two vortexes of consciousness, blending their energies together. You are not simply adding one to the other—it’s not like one plus one equals two. It is more powerful than that.
That is what is meant by a feedback loop. It is fed by an openness to mutual influence.
All states can go deeper, expand, and become more powerful because of this dynamic of mutual impact. But we need to be open to it. It is possible to reach the point where we are not afraid of being affected or impacted by our friend or our partner. Not only aren’t we afraid, we feel we are strong enough, independent enough, to be affected by the other without feeling “I am going to lose myself.” We actually welcome being impacted because we understand that being affected is a natural part of relationship.
At the depth of who we are, there are beautiful qualities: kindness, sweetness, appreciation, gratitude, clarity, brightness, depth, peacefulness, energy, dynamism, power, and so on.
The Many Faces Of Eros
What happens if you throw desire into the mix? Then you not only love each other, you want each other—which is usually experienced sexually: “I don’t just love you, I also find you quite yummy, very attractive. I am laying my eyes on you right now, but I would love to lay my hands on you!” And the other person says, “I was just feeling the same thing.”
Desire in itself is a powerful force. It is an energetic, instinctual primal force.
It is an expression of the creative force of the divine.
The interactive field between two people not only becomes charged up, it begins to sparkle, to throb, to pulsate. That is what desire brings to the field—a pulsation, a throbbing, an energetic quality. Your experience of immediacy feels not only sweet and appreciative but also like a throbbing, pulsating force that wants to move toward, wants to get closer to the other person. This is divine eros!
Eros is an expression of our basic life force, arising from the pelvis and belly center and experienced as a pulsating, throbbing, sensual vitality.
9 Magnetic Love
Our approach here is that of uniting the animal and the angel, our animal nature and our angelic or divine nature.
“There” exists only in the language of time and space. In the language of truth, nothing is “there”—it is all “here.”
The unity we are discussing is absolute, for there is neither time nor space that can separate one thing from another, you from me. We are the same—not two expressions of the same, but the same.
THE ATTRACTION CALLED LOVE This truth is beyond our comprehension, but it manifests in our hearts as the force we call love. Love wants you to be closer to the one you love.
MAGNETISM: THE PULL OF DIVINE UNITY We are working with, exploring, and arriving at this truth through the magnetic force instead of through a technique, a meditation, or a traditional practice that is not part of our lives.
don’t just want to experience the mystery of unity; we want to know it in a way that enhances our life, that makes our life more complete, more human, that can bring our humanity to fruition, to a ripening.
When our love becomes very refined, very pure, very subtle, when it is at its subtlest, purest, most delicate—which requires total vulnerability, with no defensiveness—we recognize it explicitly as a magnetic love. Not only do you feel “I love you,” but when you say, “I love you,” you cannot help but feel drawn as the words are spoken. You feel a magnetic force that can only be felt as a wanting or desire. And the desire is not for the other; it is for unity with the other.
journey. And because of that powerful force, we feel we can’t help it—we need to go there, we have to go there, we want to go there, we love to go there. We want to be as close to the truth as possible, so close that we don’t exist anymore… only the truth exists.
This force can become a powerful motive and a motivational power that can help us with the difficult task of spiritual work. As we have seen, there are many difficulties, many barriers and obscurations on the inner path.
They are so many, so powerful, and so difficult, that we need a powerful force that is beyond our own volition, beyond our own choice; otherwise, we don’t have much of a chance. If left to our own choice, we will choose to run away.
You can feel it as “I am wanting,” but it is not you who wants. It is the absolute that wants, through exerting its gravitational force.
You don’t have to push yourself in that direction. When your heart is big enough to hold it, that will happen; otherwise, it won’t.
Hameed: Maybe that is the direction. Not-knowing might be a good direction. It seems that it’s pulling you. Nobody knows the direction. You don’t know where the magnet is because it is everywhere. It is not going to pull you in one direction or another. It is going to pull you toward itself, and that will make you feel that finally you are getting closer and dissolving into some kind of mystery. One of the ways this manifests is that you don’t know what’s going on—and this not-knowing feels delicious. So just let yourself stay with the not-knowing—that you don’t know anything. Just feel it and be there.
It is not a kind of escape but really an ecstatic drive I am experiencing.
10 Sexy Angel
Meditation is a very important foundation for inquiry. In our lives, we get thrown to the surface of our experience, to the usual conventional view. The conventional consciousness of the world has the compelling perspective that the physical dimension is the most fundamental; hence, there is a gravitational pull away from presence.
That is the basis of discipline: You do something because you love it. You feel the rightness of it. That helps you to remember your intention to practice and to persevere in following through on that intention.