A.H. Almaas

We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their

good wolf h Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is a h Almos, which is the pen name of a Hamid Ali, creator of the Diamond Approach to self realization. The Diamond Approach is a contemporary teaching that developed within the context of both ancient spiritual teachings and modern depth psychology theories. Almost has authored seventeen books about spiritual Realization, including Diamond Heart Series, The Pearl Beyond Price, The Void, The Unfolding Now, and the Point of Existence.

His latest book is Runaway Realization, Living a life of ceaseless Discovery. Here's the interview. Hi, Amid, Welcome to the show. I'm excited to get you on. You are one of the founders of something known as the Diamond Approach that I've heard a lot of wonderful things about, and as I got in to reading a variety of your work, I became very interested in a lot of the things that you're saying. So we're going to explore the Diamond Approach and some of your later books also. But let's

start like we always do, with the parable. There's a grandmother who's talking with her granddaughter and she says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the granddaughter thinks about it for a second, and she looks up at her grandmother and she says, well, Grandma,

which one wins? And the grandmother says the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Yeah, so that's a nice parable, and I would like to address it from two levels. Actually, the first level is the feeding. The one who wins is the one your feet. It is a principle actually of consciousness. Just like there are laws of nature, physics, and biology, whatever consciousness of mind has its own laws

and principles. And one of those laws and principles is the fact that whatever you pay attention to tends to grow, to become more there, and tend to develop. If you ignore it, don't pay attention to it, it tends to not grow, to stay stunted, and it's growth. And now we'll come to the second level, which is what are the two worlds and a human being? The way I look at it is that the human being has a consciousness which some people call a soul or spirit or whatever,

but or mind. But it is like we have a an individual consciousness that express is and who we are, that holds our experience and through which we know ourselves and respond to our environment. This consciousness has many properties and has many faculties and capacities and has many layers in it and many parts. It is, first of all, the main spring of life. It is the life's force that functions as the life force in our physical life.

And the life force has two parts to it. You can say to parts that I refer to as the angelic part and the animal parts. The angelic part is what most teaching think of a spirit or spiritual like love, humility, compassion, and ierness, openness, truth, sincerity, awareness, emptinness, expansion, awakening. All of that has to do with what I call the angelic side or part of of the depth of for

our consciousness. Okay, the other part that we're all born with, all human being upborn with, is why I call the animal side. The animal side is like an animal invested in surviving, surviving, getting its need math. You're one of the founders of the Diamond approach, and at one point you say something to the effect that the goal of the Diamond approach is the full development and realization of being, and that being is with a capital be expressing itself

in and through an individual human life. Can you help us understand what this being is and what that full fruition looks like well being, I mean the spiritual nature. Our spiritual nature is our being, which mean what is our true existence. We are fundamentally at the depth when we know ourselves, when we go onto our subjectivity and find out who it is, what we are, recognized that what we are is not separate from the fact that we are, that we are, our being is what we are.

Our being and our identity become the same thing. And that's what I call self realization or learning about our being. So here spirit is recognized as the being of our consciousness, the true existence. It's what makes us be. So it's not just a beautiful, nice thing to have, which is fundamental. It is what we are. Yeah, it is what we are at the most fundamental level. And it said that the primary method of the diamond approaches exploring and understanding

immediate experience. What do you mean by that? Meaning that the method of them approach does not matter of doing a prayer or a chant or concentration on an object or trying to get to a certain state. It means we take our experience as it is now, meaning what we feel, what we sense in our body, in our minds, the context of our situation, so when I say it and quite into experience. Our experience includes the totality of what we're aware of and our perception and our enner

experience all of it. So it's it's inquiring to get to find out first of all what it is, because we're not always aware of everything that's happening on us or within us. So we become aware of it. And the next thing after becoming aware of it is to find out what is it? What's it about? How commit is that way? Which mean to understand it? So immediate experience means what is really happening now, not thinking about it, it's feeling it, It is sensing it and being curious

about it. What is the approach towards towards inquiry? Is that usually done? Is there a series of questions that are asked? Or help me understand a little bit more about how how you steer yourself through that in a in a type of inquiry that is useful versus possibly just ruminating on certain things. Yeah, like in our class, we could do it in a formal way when a

person has asked questions but they're not asked. Sometimes you ask some specific questions for teaching something in particular like freeing teaching about love, we ask a questions like what stops you from feeling love? What way experienced love? So for me, it is an organic thing. It's it's always I'm having experienced, always curious about what it is, what's it about? And as I'm curious about it, it opens up and falls and reveal more meaning, more shades of

meaning which reveal deeper dimensions of experience. One of the things you say that is in order to contact the deeper truth of who we are, and I think this is getting back to that inquiry, we must engage in some activity or practice that questions what we assume to be true about ourselves. If somebody, for instance, feels I don't like this person, If you just that's it, I don't like this person, that's the truth. Well, the fact

is more than that. When you explore how come you don't like this person, you might find out that this person reminds you of something in the past that hurt you, for instance, and your you and earth hurt that you didn't know about. And then what might be a whole complex like a trauma or something like that. By us taking our experience at face value is short changing ourselves because our experience is expresses really always the totality of our would be eating, but we don't see it at all.

You only you see the surface men station of it. And is that the goal of working with groups and teachers is to help you lead you through that inquiry in a in a way that's different than what you obviously know how to do, because it's very difficult my experiences to see the assumptions we're making about ourselves. They're they're embedded. Yeah, so, and our work and our groups. We teach meditation, different kinds of different practices to develop

capacities being able to feel yourself. Many people can't feel their emotions, or when they feel their emotions, they ack them out right away. So a person needs the skill of feeling their emotions without acting them out. Some people don't feel their body. They don't sense their legs or their belly, or their or some part of them and that and they need to learn to We have methods of how people can learn the uh who feel their body, the totality that the whole body become alive and sensitive.

I get hung up a lot on you know, studied a lot of different philosophies, and and it's it's often said that this, this sense of a separate self is a delusion. And what you say is that it's not. Our separate self is not a delusion, but it's one of the ways that reality appears. Our problem comes when we think it's the only way. Yeah, so you're getting

that from last book Runaway Realization. When I go further than the usual traditional teaching, which is that the self is a delusion and the dualistic point of view is not real. We are all unity when being and all that. All that's true, but you know, there are further stages that we have in our teaching. But we recognize that the way of experience, in the ordinary way of experiencing thing, where we are separate and and have an ego, we have our needs, and we treat everybody as another object.

That is just simply one way that reality manifests itself. I mean, ninety nine point nine percent of the human race are living in that world that way. So when when people say it's all delusion, it seems a little bit you know, too much, too much of presumption, because there must be a reason why everybody is experiencing that way. And so what I learned that there are many ways of experiencing reality. One of them is the ordinary way of ego. So ego just one way that true being

manifests itself. Another way it manifests itself as light and love and all that, and other ways also of true nature or or being through being manifesting itself. So that way we take the ego not as a delusion, but as one way of experiencing reality. Another way of looking at it is that it is it is a way of experiencing ourselves that got arrested its development, because it's a certain stage of development everybody goes through, regardless of how they become, they have to go through the stage

of being an ego. So it's the stage that many people get arrested at that stage, and you can work on it so that to go to the next stage instead of rejecting it as an error, as a mistake. It sounds like when we say that that ordinary viewpoint, that that idea of a separate self is a complete delusion, it's it's hard to that's a hard place to start from because it's so it seems so real, Whereas it's a lot easier to accept Okay, that's one way to see the world, and that's the way that by default

I'm seeing the world. But there are lots of other ways to do it, and that just seems to be an easier stepping off place for me. Yeah, and I think it's better to take it not as a delusion, but that's just a way of experiencing it and not to get hung up on it, that's all. Yeah, there's a gain about you know, who do you feed? If you feed that way of experiencing things, that's what becomes

your reality. If you are open to other ways of experience, think think the spiritual with and paying more attention to them. That way, it can't begin to grow. And we have the option now to experience other ways of being. What is essence? You talk about essence and again this is with a capital E, that our essence is what is really important. So what what is that I used toward essence that you know, some years ago more than I

use it now. But basically, what I meant by essence is the essence of our consciousness, the essence of our soul, essence of what we are and what we discover. That essence is nothing but being, So being an assence are the same thing. Essence means just what is what is

your essence? What is your essential nature? In that way, essence is used, and when you discover what your essence is, you organize it as a kind of presence that's self aware presence, that has its own inherent awareness, inherent lovingness. So if being is expressing itself through us, and you know we we have these essences, is my essence different than yours? And I know that you're probably gonna answer

that on multiple different levels. Well, essence is is. It's basically saying that each each of us, individually we have an essence, and our essence turns out to be the spiritual nature. So our essence turn out to be the true being or the true spirit, which is the nature and essence of everybody and everything, So we don't have separate essences. It manifests through us in different ways, but

it is the same spirit. There's discussion that most of our suffering is due to being alienated from ourselves, that a lot of the dissatisfaction comes, say, not from what we think it is, like our sickness or our material real problems or other things, but from not being ourselves. Well, I mean that is true to a large extent. You know, Buddhism forms of emphasized that that life is suffering, and in some sense life is suffering in the sense it

has lots of suffering in it. I mean there's physical suffering, killing in places, rape, and all the things around the world which is suffering that is not related to the

fact that we have we are trapped in our ego. However, at the same time that being trapped in our ego causes if we just hold on to the ego perspective, there is a lot of suffering because in the ego perspective, the animal nature is more dominant, and that one tends to be dissatisfied and tends to keep grudges, tends to carry the has to with it, to carry the what happened in the past to the presence. So there's a

reputation of especially negative things. So that is really what it is meant by that way that our identification of the world of ego, the world of the self, if we take that to be the only reality, then our life will be full of suffering and also the suffering that happens around the world, the killing and plunder and

all that. It's also because those people, those killers, those terrorists or whatever, violent criminals, they're traveled in the same things, the same they do these things because their bad wolf is in control. So yes, they're suffering, and you can trace most of it to the ego identification. But I would and say that somebody has has cancer or has you know, the abetes or asked Parkinson as because of the self or the eagle, that the body has its

own genetic makeup and they're suffering. That happens there too, independent whether we are you know, spiritually illuminated people or not. It sounds like the diamond approach. You're bringing together some meditative practices. You're bringing together psychological inquiry. Are there other key parts of it? Yeah, I bring in different meditation and inquiry. The inquiry is both psychological and spiritual and philosophical, and also there's a philosophical side, which is asking fundamental

philosophical question but answering them with the experience. The philosophy is ask good questions, but they try to answer them with their mind, and this approach we answer them by experiential inquiry. We can cause psychological but it's not just psychological because when you experience love, for instance, or when you experience compassion that is not psychological, that spiritual, and we inquire into that. When I experienced love, for instance, I inquired into us what's that? It feels like a

sweet atmosphere, it feels like it's a sweet nectar. What's that? You see? I'm inquiring in something spiritual and that's not psychological, it's beyond the psychological, so psychological as part of it that it is also a spiritual inquiry. So and and we do include meditation that we borrowed from different traditions, and meditation that we developed ourselves. We use chanting, we use actually music concentration, contemplation of music as part of

our practices. Is there is there anything that in this very short window of time like an inquiry an example of an inquiry question that we could talk about that would give listeners just a taste of what that's like. Well, I think the important thing is for each one of us to realize there's much more to us than we tend to think. There is much more potential to human being than we tend to know, if we're open to ourselves, if we really turned towards our own subjectivity, an exam

and it. Inquire it, be interested in it, be vulnerable to it. Let the empire, let it come out. Traders will come out, tragers that we haven't suspected of experiences, not just of love and compassion, but of depth and immensity. So the most important thing is to be interested into in the truth of reality, to find out the truth of reality, but not by thinking about or reading about, but experiencing it. Find out for oneself. What is the truth of what I am? What is the truth of

the world? Excellent? Well, I will make sure to put links on the website to both the school and some of your your key works that you talk about. And thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. How mean. I really appreciate it. Good luck and have a good time with your program. Okay, thanks so much, take care, Okay bye. You can learn more about A. Thomas and this podcast at one you feed dot net slash almus that's a l M A A s. Thank you.