From CHAPTER ONE

THE ORIENTATION OF THE DIAMOND APPROACH

The aim of the Diamond Approach is to live fully and deeply. It offers the understanding and the practices to support a life without unnecessary struggle and difficulty, a life characterized by fulfillment and contentment. As with most spiritual systems, the Diamond Approach invites us to live in a way that both reflects and develops wisdom, love, joy, vitality, power, peace, authenticity, passion, curiosity, appreciation, stillness, pleasure, trust, gratitude, and an unrelenting engagement with what is. Furthermore, the Diamond Approach is grounded in the knowledge that these qualities are characteristic of our true and fundamental nature. They are our inherent and undying birthright.

If we let ourselves be open to our feelings in this moment, we begin to recognize a longing for such a way of being. For some of us, the longing feels like an ache or sadness just below the surface of our usual awareness and concerns, a background so common that we fail to take notice. For others of us, it may feel like a gripping desire to gain and hold on to these qualities, an intense drive in which we set our sights on some distant spiritual paradise. Still others of us may adopt a frustrated resignation in which we devalue these qualities as an impossible or even undesirable fiction. Perhaps the most common response of all is a kind of numbness in which we sleep-walk through our days, not even considering our deeper thirst. We then delude ourselves into believing that crude counterfeits of fulfillment, love, joy, and wisdom are the real thing.

When we are cut off from our natural strength, our energy and passion are less available. The sense of expansive vitality escapes us, and we feel weak. To make up for this, we push too hard or strain to capture that passion. We try to convince the world and ourselves that we are not as weak as we feel. Bitterness or hostility flavor our activities and relationships. We then mistake this fake strength for the real thing, and we are caught on a merry-go-round of proving ourselves. The harder we try to prove our strength, the more we reinforce our weakness.

Instead of an open-hearted compassion, curiosity, and willingness to engage suffering without running away, we find a compulsive need to criticize, and then fix, ourselves and others in order to take away their pain and protect ourselves. We mistake false compassion for genuine compassion and wonder why we never feel really healed and whole. And so it goes; we dream of relief and fulfillment but settle for shallow and unsatisfying substitutes for real life.

When we allow ourselves the gift of seeing our deeper nature as one having vitality, aliveness, peace, and trust, we also become aware of the difficulties, blocks, and obstacles to these qualities. Even when we do experience them, it is only rarely and briefly.

For example, you may feel a sense of unconditional compassion for all existence. That is until someone hurts your feelings. Then compassion is out the window, replaced by your desire to hurt the other. Or, you may experience your intrinsic value as an inseparable part of the sacred mystery. That is as long as you feel seen and loved. Otherwise your shame and guilt overwhelm you, and you get busy proving yourself or hiding.

I think we all have had strong and deep experiences of some aspects of our spiritual nature, only to lose the experience. We fail to grasp what those aspects mean and what our relationship to them really is. Although we long for a rich, fulfilling life and believe (or at least hope) that this is possible, it usually feels outside our reach. Our daily affairs are colored by mistrust and difficulty, and the barriers to our potential seem so much more real than that potential.

Rather than suggesting we fight against these obstacles to find fulfillment and contentment, the Diamond Approach invites us to understand them from a radically different perspective. In this view, they are not merely barriers; they are doorways, too. Hurt is not simply a block to genuine compassion. It is also the access to compassion. Anger or the desire to inflict hurt is not just a shallow and frustrating substitute for authentic strength. Experienced and understood deeply, it is the key to unlocking the treasure of expansion, capacity, and vitality that is our birthright. Our misunderstandings, reactions, and wounds open the doors to a life that is real. The Diamond Approach shows us the precise relationship between these counterfeit qualities, their attendant difficulties, and the more real aspects of our nature and our potential.

Even with a precise understanding of the connection between psychological issues and the qualities of our intrinsic nature, the work of self-realization takes commitment, courage, and love for the truth. Our beliefs about ourselves and the world constrict our experience and become solidified into fixed (and fixated) patterns of feelings and reactions. These patterns give our lives a defensive or compulsive texture. Even our understanding of self-realization becomes a projection of these images, beliefs, and patterns. Our usual attempts to free ourselves, based on these patterns, only bind us tighter. Given our identification with the obstacles and difficulties, we can scarcely imagine what real wisdom, joy, and contentment might be. The Diamond Approach shows us not only how, but why the work of fully experiencing our lives is so difficult.

The Diamond Approach brings about a transformation beyond these images, beliefs, and fixated patterns toward our deeper nature. It means penetrating the false images and patterns and grounding our lives in an unrelenting love for our lives as they are: painful, ecstatic, or fulfilled. Spiritual realization is not merely a linear projection of a life based from the past to the future. It requires a new foundation which is grounded in the present. The Diamond Approach provides not only an understanding of this foundation, but ways to move toward it that are appropriate and powerful.

Encountering our lives in this moment, as they are, we begin to respond from the perspective of truth, openness, and trust. We relax into difficulties and unavoidable struggles, with an experiential knowledge that we can live our lives fully. We discover we do not need to avoid or fall asleep to our situations. We become present and awake.

Each moment that we are able to experience our lives more fully and with less censorship, we become more open, spontaneous, natural, fluid, and responsive. Our distress unfolds into a confidence and appreciation which is without judgment or hesitation. There is a joyful curiosity and a generous, unassuming calm at our center. We discover our capacities to be strong as well as still, tender as well as clear, accepting as well as persevering, relaxed as well as fully awake to this moment and its movement. And through it all, we come to abide in a basic trust in the compassionate intelligence of the unfolding of our lives.

Everyday life becomes the arena for this work. The defensive, constricting patterns are the both the locks and the keys to the qualities of our true nature. The present moment is revealed as both the path and the fulfillment. The orientation of the Diamond Approach, then, is toward presence and the expression of fundamental truths in the present moment. This presence offers remarkably complete and effective answers to the fundamental human questions. The questions are, what is the fullest realization of our true nature, and how can we go about realizing it? The answer is presence.

The Diamond Approach as a Spiritual Path

The Diamond Approach offers a psychologically-sophisticated spiritual system. This system includes both an understanding and a path for full realization which draws on both ancient spiritual wisdom and modern psychological insights. It is both a description of the full potential of human experience and a method for the realization of that potential. Its insights are fundamentally consistent with other approaches to spiritual truth, although it does not attempt to explain other approaches or reduce them to its own terms.

In this view, psychological growth is an aspect of spiritual growth, inseparable from it. Whereas other spiritual paths might focus primarily on physical disciplines such as yoga or martial arts, devotional practices, prayer, or contemplation, the primary method in the Diamond Approach is exploring and understanding immediate experience. If this exploration is deep enough and sincere enough, it will lead to spiritual awakening, development, and eventually, liberation.

Along the way, we come to a greater understanding, and we work through the blocks to our true nature or Essence. We develop and refine higher capacities. When we experience a block deeply, it leads to that which the block was covering. This brings a painful experience of deficient emptiness, followed by a sense of presence and the direct experience of Essence. These psychological issues stimulate our growth in a way similar to the grain of sand which serves as the seed for a pearl.

Psychological issues are present throughout the spiritual search. We move through our initial fears, frustrations, and even hopes about what a spiritual search will mean, to the subtle attachments and resistances present in the most sublime spiritual states. These issues, fears, and hopes have long been recognized as contrary to our deeper nature and obstacles to deeper self-realization. However, these issues are not only barriers; they also guide us toward the truths underlying them. The Diamond Approach provides us with a precise means of understanding and resolving such issues, revealing them as both obstacles and doorways to self-realization.

The goal of the Diamond Approach is the full development and realization of Being expressing itself in and through an individual human life. It posits no particular end-state or experience. Its goal is not necessarily love, wisdom, power, will, action, bliss, peace, or emptiness. All of these are intrinsic to human potential and do arise as part of the path of the Diamond Approach. However, none is a specific aim of the Diamond Approach, so we do not stop there. The journey of understanding and truth continues without preconceptions or prejudice. The result is the free unfoldment of a living reality without constrictions or distortions.

The Methods of the Diamond Approach

The Diamond Approach uses a broad range of methods. In private sessions with a teacher and in small groups, students of the Diamond Approach explore their feelings, thoughts, and actions. It integrates emotional, cognitive, and intuitive processes, breathwork, and subtle energies all within a spiritual framework. (The several case studies presented in this book are examples of this way of working).

There are also a variety of formats for pursuing this path. Students of the Diamond Approach generally do this work in individual sessions with teachers trained and certified by Hameed Ali, who developed the Diamond Approach. Students also meet in small, ongoing groups led by a teacher. Large group meetings are used to teach, using a combination of lectures, experiential exercises, and meditation, and other practices. Ali and other Diamond Approach teachers also conduct longer teaching retreats. Finally, students of the Diamond Approach engage in their own study and application of this material through meditation, reading, and other specific practices.

These methods and formats for learning the Diamond Approach have evolved in response to the needs of students and of the Diamond Approach itself. The variety of forms which the Diamond Approach takes will likely continue to expand.

The Diamond Approach and Other Spiritual and Psychological Systems

Enduring spiritual truth arises in different times and places. The Diamond Approach expresses such truth, making it accessible to us in a form suitable to our time and place. Because it has come out of our specific cultural, intellectual, and psychological context, it communicates spiritual wisdom in a way that is uniquely suited to us.

Two aspects of the present time are especially important to this form. First, there is much more communication across cultures and between different spiritual systems. Because we can have first-hand knowledge of many different spiritual traditions, new understandings are possible. Second, we also have available to us new knowledge that was not available before, especially knowledge about psychological development, suffering, and healing. For the first time, psychological and spiritual wisdom are available together. The Diamond Approach incorporates the findings of psychology with integrations of the wisdom of a variety of spiritual traditions.

However, Ali does not merely restate or translate others' spiritual wisdom or combine together psychology and spirituality. The Diamond Approach is neither a combination nor a revision of these systems. It is its own system, arising from the needs and opportunities of this particular time and place and through Ali's particular expression.

The Diamond Approach is consistent with a number of psychological and spiritual systems. It is congruent with aspects of the Gurdjieff work, Sufism, Vajrayana and Zen Buddhism, and modern psychodynamic theory. It is consistent with many insights and practices from these spiritual wisdom traditions which are now more widely available. At the same time, it draws from Ego Psychology, Object Relations Theory, and other psychological systems. I believe the perspective of the Diamond Approach is unique among spiritual systems in its integration of the psychological and spiritual aspects of full human development.

The Diamond Approach extends the earlier spiritual disciplines by providing a more thorough understanding of psychological issues, barriers, and obstacles as they occur throughout the spiritual search. And, although it is not a psychology, it has much to offer to the deeper goals of psychology. The case can be made that throughout its history, psychology has been moving toward a perspective such as this. Psychology has aimed to provide an experientially and intellectually satisfying understanding of being human and to provide a means of realizing human potential. The Diamond Approach moves us a step closer to fulfilling the promise of psychology, especially the transpersonal psychologies, by making psychological knowledge useful in spiritual work.

Being, Essence, Soul, and True Nature

It might help to give a brief map of the Diamond Approach and introduce its basic concepts here in the first chapter. Most of these terms are described later in the book and in thorough detail in Ali's writings. In the Diamond Approach, the true nature of existence is referred to as Being . Being is the fundamental nature of all manifestation; it is the ground and the expression of the exquisite diversity of all that is. Being reveals itself as both diversity and unity. From this ground of Being arise awareness, presence, flow, and emptiness.

The soul is the individual consciousness or medium of experience. It is not a fixed or entity (as the concept is sometimes understood), but a pattern flow of consciousness. The soul is shaped and influenced by all experience, and it may be structured by the conditioning of the ego (or personality) or by its true nature, Being. In a sense, it is the soul which makes the journey of awakening from conditioned and constricted patterns to the realization of its true nature. The true nature of a person, as it arises in the soul, is referred to as Essence .

Essence is the pure, unconditioned nature of who we are. As the foundation for our everyday experiences as well as our sublime spiritual high points, it is always present, though usually hidden from our consciousness. Essence can be experienced in many different aspects and dimensions. It is not just one big, generic "spirit," but a whole world of qualities which can be discriminated in a precise way. When we first awaken to it, we may be struck or touched by a sense of presence, like what we experience is real in a way that is beyond our minds. Essence is the truth within the forms and experiences of our lives

The work of the soul is to open, clarify, and purify itself in order to experience Essence more directly, more completely, and with fewer obscurations or blocks. Essence is then experienced as open, clear, and pure. When this same true nature is recognized as the true nature of everything, it is referred to as Being.

Without direct experience of these phenomena, descriptions of them are merely beliefs or will not make sense at all. A fundamental premise of the Diamond Approach is that these admittedly cryptic descriptions can, in fact, be experientially understood and validated. The point of the Diamond Approach is to help make Being understandable as a lived reality and to deepen and refine our soul's openness to Essence. When there is direct contact with presence, awareness, emptiness, Essence, and Being, these phenomena are no more mysterious than any other. In fact, that direct contact will be even more clear than our ordinary experience. We realize in our everyday existence, consciousness, actions, and relationships, that our true nature is Being.

Personal Dimensions of Being

The Diamond Approach provides a systematic description of the various forms of Being, their particular qualities, their dynamics, and their associated psychological issues. In the personal realm, Being manifests as the ego and Essence. These are personal in the sense that they are experienced as being your own and you can identify with them. It makes sense to say, "This is my ego or my Essence."

Diamond Dimensions

In another realm, which Ali calls the Diamond Dimensions, Being is revealed through its universal qualities. The seven Diamond Dimensions are Objective Understanding, Pleasure, Conscience or Action, Knowledge, Love, Will, and Humanness. The attributes and qualities of Being which can be experienced in a personal way are here experienced as universal qualities. Furthermore, they are experienced in an objective and undistorted way. A knowing and understanding arises with the Essential quality, and this understanding is not separate from the experience of Being. Here, I am using "objective" in the sense of something being known in a non-subjective, unbiased, and unfiltered way, rather than in the sense of making Essence into an object. Our personal histories and concepts of Essence fade into the background in this realm, and the qualities of Being are experienced in a more pure way as more vivid, alive, and real. There is, at the same time, a more objective knowing of these qualities.  

For example, in the personal realm, the experience of Essential Love is deeper and more authentic than the usual experience of love based on mental constructs and emotional needs. In the universal realm or Diamond Dimensions, love feels present in an unconditional way, pure and clear. The heart feels universal. Furthermore, we not only feel authentic love, we know it in a clear, insightful, and objective way, we find pleasure in it, and we discover that is brings with it the necessary support to manifest it.

Boundless Dimensions

Ali calls a third realm the Boundless dimensions. The five Boundless dimensions have identifiable qualities but are not experienced from the perspective of the individual. In the Boundless Dimensions, there is no experiencer separate from the experience, only the unconditional experience of Divine Love, the fullness of presence, clear awareness, the dynamic unfolding of existence, and the absolute mystery of Being. There is no sense of a boundary within or around these dimensions.

It may help to remember that all these dimensions of Being (personal, universal, and Boundless) are always present, although they are rarely experienced directly. The Diamond Approach offers means for experiencing directly these dimensions of Being as the foundation and source of our lives.

The Unfoldment of Being

Being unfolds and manifests in an orderly way from the absolute mystery beyond human experience into the multitude of forms and objects of the phenomenal world. As it unfolds, it flows through these various dimensions in a progression from those closer to the mystery to those closer to the phenomenal world. Depending on the level from which you are perceiving, reality has very different characteristics. From some dimensions, reality is seen as a unity; from others, it is divided. Duality appears in some dimensions and not others. Consciousness can move through the various levels of Being if it is free and unconstrained. The more consciousness is free, the more it will respond to the call of Being. Being will manifest precisely in the ways that the situation calls for.

As Being flows from the Absolute to its personal and physical dimensions, it becomes expressed or manifest, first as the Boundless Dimensions, then by the Diamond Dimensions, and then in an individual and personal way. When Being is expressed on this personal level, it is the most accessible and most easily recognized. (And we should remember that all of these dimensions are present at once and that this linear outline of unfoldment is more metaphoric than literal. This is just a general pattern; our experience is much more fluid.) All dimensions, including the physical, the personal aspects of Essence, and the Boundless dimensions, reflect and express Being. They are not merely barriers to or constrictions of Being. Neither are they constructed through mental concepts or social agreements.

Personality or ego structures, on the other hand, do consist of structures which are extrinsic, mechanical, restrictive, and constructed through our interactions with the world. Yet even these conditioned personality structures are seen by the Diamond Approach to be expressions of presence, love, knowledge, will, fullness, flow, awareness, emptiness, and the absolute mystery, however limited or distorted they are. The understanding that all manifestations, even personality, are manifestations of Being is central to the Diamond Approach. This understanding leads to Ali's insights on the role of the personality in spiritual work and self-realization, and it allows for a much deeper and effective means of spiritual discovery and development. Placing the personality in the context of Being is an important contribution of the Diamond Approach.

Most people start their personal work by working on personality issues, reactions, and blocks. They also have some fleeting experiences of Essence. The path of the Diamond Approach is most often a systematic movement and a deepening of Essence from the realm of personality and personal dimensions of Essence through the Diamond Dimensions to the Boundless, egoless, nondual dimensions. From the point of view of the soul, our experience is one of movement, recovery, discovery, and development. From the point of view of Being, it is always complete and perfect.

In order to help make these ideas clearer, I have included in the book lengthy excerpts from the writing of Hameed Ali (written under the pen-name, A. H. Almaas). However, I have not included them on this website. Please refer to the book and to Almaas's writing for these passages. These excerpts are drawn from different books by him and offer different flavors of the Diamond Approach. Most of all, these excerpts offer this path in Ali's own voice.

In the first passage, Ali introduces the Diamond Approach to a group of students who have been working with him for some time. They have been using the practices of the Diamond Approach to explore their everyday lives, concerns, and experiences. This exploration has led them to some degree of release from their issues and to various experiences of Essence, their authentic and unconditional nature. However, until this point there had been little emphasis on the system, method, and understanding of the Diamond Approach. They were, so to speak, eating a wonderful meal without much knowledge about what the cooks were doing back in the kitchen. In this excerpt, Ali steps back from these explorations to provide a glimpse into the kitchen. This passage is from the chapter, THE DIAMOND APPROACH TO THE WORK in Diamond Heart Book One: Elements of the Real in Man (Shambhala Publications), Chapter Three, pages 35-56.