EPILOGUE

THE FLAME OF THE SEARCH, GUIDANCE, AND THE LOVE OF TRUTH

This book started on a personal note. Then it described and illustrated the main concepts and methods of the Diamond Approach. Now it is time to direct it to you and your journey. Your immediate experience, approached with courage, compassion, trust, and surrender, is both the path and the fulfillment of your potential as a human being. Living fully and openly is possible. This is the promise of the Diamond Approach.

However, this promise is not fulfilled automatically or even easily. Sincere commitment and dedicated practice are required. Three specific capacities will serve you in the work of realizing and developing your potential. These are not the only three, of course, but they are helpful, even necessary, at all stages of spiritual work.

First, there is the inner fire which motivates and fuels this work. Ali calls this the flame of the search. At first it may feel like an itch in your soul or a longing that returns again and again. Your suffering may wake you up to this fire. It can start as an ember which, when touched by the breath of your sincerity, catches fire, calling you out of your sleep, calling you to look deeply into yourself. All the layers of veils which have built up through your life make the work unbelievably arduous. And it is exactly here that the flame serves you, bringing the energy it takes to stay with your journey.

What is motivating your questions and your search right now? What keeps you asking for a more meaningful and fulfilling life? Can you recognize the flame in yourself as a kind of hunger, a desire, a longing? The feeling may be subtle at first, but it will grow. If you can let this flame get stronger, it will burn away your dullness, your preconceptions, your judgments, your stuckness. It will bring you into contact with yourself in a stark and relentless way. I encourage you to let this burning itself become the goal--not feeling better, not learning, not achieving, but simply being on fire with your search.

Now, when you let down the armor of your beliefs, you will find you really don't know what you need or where you need to go. You'll discover that every intention and every direction you can think to go is a product of your conditioning. Every aim, no matter how lofty it seems, comes from a hole, a feeling of deficiency. When you use this flame to enter that hole, you open yourself to unthinkable new possibilities, unthinkable because your past history made them so.

This flame burns even brighter when you allow yourself to not know. Then, another capacity arises--a guidance. At first, your ego says, "Oh good, now I'll get a direction." Yet the guidance does not give you a direction, at least not the kind your ego recognizes. This guidance brings you deeper into the present and helps you drop the prejudices of your past. It directs you to question all those old stories you've been telling yourself for years, the stories about your weakness, your wrongness, your separateness, or your deficiency. When you drop your pseudo-knowing, you enter a kind of emptiness or ignorance.

What would it mean to open yourself to not knowing where you are going or what you need? Could you, right now, suspend your plans and ideas about where to go next, for just a moment. Can you trust the guidance--or at least begin to see what blocks you from trusting it? (Revealing the obstacles is the action of guidance, too.) How would it be if you were to bow to the guidance, even if it brings up fear or hurt? In bowing to it, you honor its wisdom. Then, you come up straight again, willing to follow the guidance for at least one more step. The guidance will always lead you toward what matters, toward greater presence. Ali writes:

Begin with the awareness that you don't know the answers. And be aware of the feverish attempts in your mind to convince yourself that you know. It's not only that you don't know the answers, you don't know whether the questions can be answered. Allow the questions to remain even if you don't know whether there is an answer. Can you be that sincere with yourself? There is guidance and help here, but not to give answers, only to help you inquire. This Work is to encourage your own inner development, whatever that may be, to help you remain steadfast with your inquiry. ( Diamond Heart Book Three , p. 4)

There is a third capacity along with the flame of the search and the guidance that this work requires. In some sense, it is the most fundamental. It is the love of truth. When you love the truth, you love it unconditionally, not because it will make you feel better and not because it will make you free. The love itself is the freedom.

The guidance will lead you to this love, and the flame will energize your search, but only if you are willing to give yourself to the work. You don't have to do this all at once, but just turning toward this love will carry you on. Turn yourself toward loving just what is. Turn yourself toward the pain that leads you to the flame and toward the emptiness that opens you to the guidance. Compassion befriends you as you sit with your pain, and a playful curiosity reassures you with its lightness. Turning toward the love of truth will empower you to give yourself more fully to your journey. Love is the key to giving yourself in this way.

The beauty of the Diamond Approach is that it helps you understand the need to love the truth, the barriers to this love, and the connection between love and its obstacles. If loving the truth, surrendering to the guidance, or fueling your flame were merely spiritual commands, they would be virtually impossible. Look how many people have been exposed to such teachings and how few have been able to realize them in their lives. As I have tried to show, the Diamond Approach illuminates the barriers to spiritual work as well as its possibilities. You can know that these challenges bring with them whatever you need in order to solve them. You can understand how the key to your freedom lies within--not outside--your prison. As you look into your experience in the present moment, you will begin to see what's in your way. And when you see, the obstacle begins to transform.

When I talk about the need to surrender, your unconscious may begin to recall times as a child when you were in a conflict and were hurt. Maybe you remember times when you didn't know something and you were shamed for not knowing "the answer" or for not meeting someone else's standards. You may have learned to give yourself away, but only as an attempt to avoid aloneness and to get by in your family. Or you may find yourself having some reactions to what I have said about the Diamond Approach. You may feel angered, scared, or saddened by these descriptions. You may feel it is too obtuse, judgmental, or out of touch with reality. It is helpful to recognize these reactions and allow yourself to look into them and their roots.

If you look deeply into your experience, you will find exactly, precisely, one hundred percent what you need to continue your inquiry. Through your hurt, you will find the compassion to tolerate the hurt and go deeper. Through your shame, you will come to the sense of self-worth which allows you to open more. Through your fear of aloneness, you will discover the support you need to persevere with confidence. In your reactivity, you may find that you have projected your past hurts into the present, and through it, you will come to an unshakable acceptance of your life. All the qualities and dimensions of Essence are available to you to further your inquiry into the truth.

As you let the flame fuel your search, as you let your not-knowing make room for the guidance to come in, and as you begin to love the truth unconditionally, your life unfolds with power, tenderness, and meaning. Ali, again:

When you really get into seeing things about yourself, it's very painful. You don't like it, but something in you says, "I want to feel this and get to the bottom of it." Nobody's making you do it. So in that moment, what is compelling you? It is somehow your desire to see the truth. Seeing the truth seems to be fulfilling in itself, it seems to bring some subtle pleasure and joy. So you want to see it regardless of how difficult it is. It is no longer a question of what is a true statement or perception or not. There is something more, and something more subtle. It is, in a sense, that the truth wants itself. And that's what is called the love of truth for its own sake. In that situation, it is such a deep, compelling desire that when it is there, nothing can stand in its way--not fear, not pain. ( Diamond Heart Book One , p. 96-97)

Finally, you come to the deepest realization which is the source of the flame, the guidance, and the love of truth. You see that all along it has been the truth of Being seeking itself. Being is aware of itself through you. Your mind, your search, your joy, your love, your emptiness, and the unfathomable mystery of your existence--these are its organs of perception.

Then you discover that the fulfillment of your life is serving Being. Your life is an expression of Being, and the highest action you can take is to give yourself to Being. When you serve Being fully, you dedicate yourself to awakening your senses so that Being perceives itself more fully. You work to purify and clarify your soul so that the Absolute flows through it with grace and ease. You open your heart to both give it away and receive the Divine. You welcome your joy, because this way Being knows its joy. Your knowledge and understanding are the ways Being knows and understands itself. Your life becomes a vehicle for Being.

To be sure, there is much hard work to be done. But the next step is always just in front of you. Each moment you have the opportunity to open yourself to Being. Each time you are even a little bit more aware of your breath and the world around you, Being comes closer to itself, and your life is infused with a touch of contentment. When you are open to your particular suffering and willing to be empty, alone, and intimate with yourself, your true nature is revealed. Being comes to know its own Essence.

You don't have to do it all at once, just the next little bit. I invite you to turn toward the presence of your life as it is right now, in this moment.