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Loving the Truth, Exploring the Now: The Heart-Call of the Diamond Approach · Deep Transformation

• 0:00
  Welcome to our second conversation in the Jeweled Path series with Karen Johnson and A.
• 0:05
  H.
• 0:05
  Almaas, co founders of the Ridhwan School, home of the Diamond Approach.
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  Starting with the Power of Inquiry, the major practice in the teachings path of waking up.
• 0:14
  From there we dive into the deep end of the pool of human consciousness.
• 0:18
  This should not be missed.
• 0:23
  Welcome to Deep Transformation, Self, Society, Spirit.
• 0:28
  Life enhancing paradigm rattling conversations with cutting edge thinkers, contemplatives and activists.
• 0:34
  With Dr.
• 0:34
  Roger Walsh and John Dupuy.
• 0:39
  Welcome to Deep Transformation, Self, Society, Spirit.
• 0:43
  I'm Roger Walsh, our co host is John Dupuy.
• 0:46
  And today we have the pleasure of continuing our series on the Jeweled Path, the biography of the Diamond Approach to inner realization.
• 0:57
  We've had the privilege over the last year of having a series of dialogues with Hameed Ali, whose pen name is A.
• 1:03
  H.
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  Almaas, in which he's given us an overview of the Diamond Approach, particularly as laid out in his magnum opus, the Inner Journey Home.
• 1:12
  But we've now moved into a beautiful more personal and biographic approach because Karen Johnson, who is a co creator of the Diamond Approach, has written this beautiful book, the Jeweled Path, which is what it says, the biography of
• 1:31
  the Diamond Approach to inner realization.
• 1:34
  And it just lays out so beautifully the story of how these two people explored and opened themselves to their own experience and to the discovery of the depths of.
• 1:51
  Of their own depths.
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  But depths of realization and understanding that came to them and through them which eventually culminated in the Diamond Approach.
• 2:00
  At the heart of the Diamond Approach, as they both state very clearly, is a central practice called inquiry.
• 2:07
  And Karen, that's where I wanted to start because you say actually in the forward.
• 2:12
  Perhaps the central aspect of our process that many people are unaware of is that much of this happened while we were watching tv, sitting in a cafe, strolling along the sidewalk, shopping or riding in the car.
• 2:27
  Sounds a very pleasant way of discovering a new path.
• 2:31
  And then you allude to inquiry, but the next real mention is not until some of the early groups.
• 2:39
  But I wonder if you could give us a sense of how you both came to the discovery of inquiry and how it refined over time.
• 2:49
  I don't know if I would see it as a discovery of inquiry.
• 2:54
  It began with curiosity, interests, mutual kind of excitement and exploring all kinds of things.
• 3:04
  It started out with Hameed and I, when we lived together in Boulder, just started being interested in talking about all kinds of things we were learning and discovering and he was sort of in the process of moving into
• 3:20
  presence and exploring it.
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  We hadn't started that conversation yet, but There was immediately a mutual interest in experience.
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  And then as he discovered more about presence.
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  And then kind of opened the door for me around that, the exploration got more and more honed and distilled into inner experience.
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  And what was happening in our inner experience and the curiosity.
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  And it just kind of took hold.
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  It was only formalized to being inquiry.
• 3:53
  Much later on, as we've began to see that a certain kind of probing and interest in getting very precise and clear about experience started opening up to new experience.
• 4:09
  So that's when we began to actually see it as a practice.
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  But before then, it was a natural probing that we just were drawn into.
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  It was just something that kind of took us in.
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  And we couldn't really get away from it.
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  So it was formalized much later as inquiry.
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  And certain principles apply to it.
• 4:34
  That we engage with and teach our students how to do it.
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  But we had to really step back and look at the ways in which we engaged with our inner practice.
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  Similar to the Socratic method, I think.
• 4:47
  And you've done that to me, Hameed, in these conversations.
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  I said, Hameed, what about this?
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  And goes, well, what do you think?
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  And he puts it right back on me.
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  And it's been very powerful.
• 4:56
  So that's a long, long noble history of ways to arrive at truth.
• 5:01
  I think that's how I saw it that began so like a Socratic inquiry.
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  And I had studied Socratic dialogues, what the Plato wrote.
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  I was impacted by that.
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  And later on, I studied psychoanalysis.
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  And then I work with teachers who use psychoanalysis in working with students in groups, instead of doing gestalt or something like that.
• 5:29
  Was really analyzing their experience, the momentary experience at the time.
• 5:35
  So that's what these are part of the influences that naturally my consciousness integrated all those together, without me intending it, into some kind of investigation.
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  I used to call it investigation of our experience.
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  Investigating experience.
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  At the beginning, it was an investigation of psychological experience.
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  Because that's what everybody finds first.
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  Psychological patterns, reaction, feeling, the emotion, all that.
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  But then, as we did that, that point became investigation into presence itself.
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  At some point, I have to say that I had none of that training.
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  I mean, I had read Socrates in school and touched into various things.
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  But it was never an earnest delving.
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  I was just an innocent in terms of being curious and interested.
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  And just really taken by the questions.
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  And that Hameed's questions were very, very opening kinds of questions.
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  And then it gave rise to that same questioning mind.
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  It's like a mindset.
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  It's not just how to do it.
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  It's actually A stance.
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  It's an inner stance that requires openness and the willingness to go into the unknown and to really, really be interested with.
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  With earnestness.
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  So I had none of that training, but it was really kind of.
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  I was captured by the vortex of it.
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  And one of the influences is a Sufi influence, especially a particular Sufi story called the Land of Truth in one of Idrisha books.
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  And that is very significant.
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  We read it all the time to our students to show that.
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  Because the Land of Truth is basically the story shows the importance of loving truth for his own sake.
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  That runs throughout the whole.
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  All of your teachings.
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  Yeah.
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  And that has become a principle.
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  Our inquiry, which is not oriented toward getting someplace.
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  It is just want to see what is the truth of this.
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  And it doesn't matter what the truth is.
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  You just want to see the truth.
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  Loving truth, its own sake is not an easy thing for people to have.
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  Most people want no experience because they want it to get better.
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  And that's really the heart of curiosity, is to feel, feel the heart's desire to know.
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  And it brings the heart and the mind together as one unit where there's a synergy between them.
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  It isn't just curiosity about anything.
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  It's really a honing in on what is really true in your experience, no matter what it is.
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  So it's not a truth you're shooting for.
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  So it's not like just putting out what is beauty.
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  You know, some of the.
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  The ways in which the Socratic method had been used, looking at the Platonic forms and then, you know, seeing what they are.
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  It's really that you are both the investigator and the investigated out of real true interest.
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  So the heart and the mind really is the type of curiosity that we're talking about, where there's a desire but also a heartfelt desire to know, really wanting to know.
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  And that requires not knowing and coming from a place of not using your historical knowledge, but to suspend all of that and be willing to find out something really truly new and novel.
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  Another influence that went into it is a scientific method.
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  I came in from the sciences, so my mind already has integrated the scientific method, which is you want to know the truth, the objective, the way it is not what somebody wanted scientific Methodists originally and really just wanting
• 9:25
  to find out.
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  But of course, in the sciences it is a mental exercise.
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  It's the mind mostly.
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  Although many of the scientists have hearts of what they want.
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  They're really interested in finding out the truth about what they're external things, physical things.
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  Here the scientific method Combined with the Socratic method.
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  And using the Sufi perspective.
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  Loving the truth for its own sake combines the love and the mind.
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  So the scientific method is combined with the heart.
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  So that it's not just a mental separation.
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  The mind is used with the heart of the guidance.
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  And you are a very faithful journaling throughout this whole process.
• 10:07
  And you refer to it quite often in the book, Karen.
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  And, you know, these experiences would come up.
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  And you'd just be writing down just invaluable record.
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  Of how this teaching was unfolding itself through you guys.
• 10:19
  Well, without the journals, I think it would be really difficult.
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  To actually be able to disseminate the teaching.
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  Because each teaching that is done really goes through the journals.
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  And we see what the patterns are in the through line.
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  Through various things.
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  There's so many details that were revealed.
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  That there's no way you can remember all of them.
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  So Hami's stalwart commitment to his journals.
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  I was much more sporadic.
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  But his stalwartness to it really is the canon of the teaching.
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  And we've got, like, piles and piles of journals That I was plowing through to write this book.
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  Things that I had not remembered.
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  And that made new connections, really, as I was writing the book.
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  But the whole question of mind and heart.
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  Is really a very important marriage in this work.
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  That they're companions, they're not enemies.
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  And they have each a very important contribution.
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  To what it means to explore inwardly.
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  You can't do it without love, without tenderness, without sensitivity.
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  But you also can't know without discernment, clarity, precision.
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  It doesn't allow the bubbles to get pierced In a way that knowledge really expresses itself In a true, meaningful and immediate way.
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  And that's how presence showed up, Was in these various colors and textures.
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  That were the real resolutions to different kinds of psychological issues.
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  At least as our consciousness presented at the beginning.
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  And moving through those.
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  And then finding a doorway opened as that resolve occurred.
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  And bringing out the language of being.
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  Which has all of these different colors and textures.
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  And just began to speak more and more fully and more clearly.
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  And then we began to see the real meaning in being.
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  And how it was really speaking through these various discriminations of itself.
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  Like the presence that came to us or to me at the very beginning.
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  That lit up feeling began to discriminate itself.
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  Into the various qualities and textures.
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  And the qualities came forward.
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  And it is like a language.
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  It's like learning to decode Being is allowing it to speak through your consciousness.
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  But not trying to make it English.
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  It's a whole Nother language.
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  It is not a spoken language.
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  It's a felt language.
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  Yeah.
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  I was thinking that, you know, the way the inquiry works, that we are interested in the experience that is presenting itself.
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  We're not trying to get someplace.
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  We don't only explore deep, fundamental questions.
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  And whatever happens to be the experience now presenting itself and exploring.
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  And we ask questions.
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  Usually in a psychoanalytic method, you ask questions, and then from the responses, you make an interpretation.
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  Here we don't make an interpretation.
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  We ask a question.
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  And the question time open up the field of consciousness to deeper strata.
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  And that is how consciousness reveals its presence.
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  The presence becomes a response, the meaning instead of interpretation.
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  Right.
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  So you feel the meaning in its immediacy rather than the interpretation.
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  It gives something meaning.
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  It also opens to new questions.
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  It's not like you get to baseline.
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  You've got the answer.
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  That's it.
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  No, you get to something that feels basic.
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  And then the trap door opens and you fall through and you start asking more questions.
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  It opens up more space.
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  It brings out more possibilities, not distilling them down to one possibility.
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  There's many possibilities.
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  And that feels so important because you're pointing.
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  There's so much in what's been said already.
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  I'm just trying to pull it all together, but about so many themes.
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  First, you emphasize, Karen, that there's an attitude underlying this.
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  And there's also a passion for just opening to truth or experience, however it is, to whatever extent possible, letting go presuppositions about the way it should be or what it should become or how it should change.
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  So there's a radical openness.
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  And it feels like a radical acceptance to whatever arises.
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  And fundamental trust here.
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  Deep trust, it seems.
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  Trust, interest, definitely.
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  But there's also a really important piece to this, which is that you can have openness, you can have the attitude, which is a very important beginning.
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  But the deepening into new layers, I feel, has a significant point to it, which is that you need to be practicing presence, meaning being able to do some of the practices that open up the actual consciousness to be
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  available to going deeper.
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  Because you can slide around on a horizontal plane for a very long time and feel like you're learning new things.
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  But it's like being on a lake and just looking at the surface.
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  Surface of it, rather than actually sinking into it.
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  And that's what makes it important that there's practices that help to develop a sensitivity to presence.
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  So it's not just the inquiry on its own.
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  Although that is basically what it is that came forward for us.
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  We also were sensing.
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  We were looking, listening, doing practices that opened up our bodies in a way that allowed us to feel sensations that were more subtle.
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  That we could have a sense of a subtlety of sensation that began to feel like the subtlety of consciousness itself.
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  Rather than just the physical sensations of the body.
• 16:56
  Okay, it seems like there's something very important here which would be good to tease out.
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  And that is, you say it's easy to kind of come to a particular depth and kind of go horizontally rather than open to the still deeper layers.
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  What is it that allows or encourages us to go to that deeper level?
• 17:21
  I think there's a lot of elements there.
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  And for us, it was, at least for me, Hameed, challenging where I was that in a true friendship, if you can't take challenge, it's based on something that's not real.
• 17:39
  It's based on maintaining a certain self image, a certain mutual support that is supporting someone's identity.
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  But to be challenged is one thing.
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  But also there's practices we do that enable.
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  We had to really look back on this because it was so easy for us to just have it go into the fullness of our bodies and consciousness.
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  It was easy to embody what we were experiencing.
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  But for most people, the body itself is thick with structures.
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  And consciousness takes on the form in a way that we become an object in this world rather than the object of the divine, which we are.
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  So there's practices we do that open up the body and help it to become more sensitized.
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  That's one thing.
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  The other is the mindset of most human beings is, I want to find the answer.
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  And when they get to the answer or something that feels basic, that's it.
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  And people stop looking.
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  This is where teachers come in very handy.
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  And for our work, for some reason, just inquiry doesn't let you stay there unless that's where you need to be for a while.
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  Some people do just stay at a certain place, and that's the appropriate thing for them.
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  It isn't what the teaching provides as possibilities.
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  And I think for Hameed, you can just see the ways in which things continued to open up.
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  And the same for me.
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  And that's because it's a display of the possibilities of the teaching.
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  But not everybody's going to experience all of those possibilities.
• 19:19
  It's important, I think, to recognize from our discussion, it's obvious that the common understanding of inquiry is not what we talk about.
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  Most people, they hear the word inquiry.
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  They think of it as a mental exercise, both in the Scientific field and the psychological field, it is a mental exercise.
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  And for us, inquiry, we don't mean that it includes the mind, but include everything else, include the heart, include the body.
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  So it's really total overall utilization of all the capacities of consciousness as piercing.
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  The veils of all the ways consciousness comes forward.
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  That includes our body, our heart, our mind, as Hameed was saying.
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  And it takes many years for people to refine inquiry.
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  Even in the school, it's very easy for some people still to pop into the mind and have that be the arena that inquiry's happening in.
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  Just like any practice, it takes time too.
• 20:23
  It takes time and it takes really doing it earnestly.
• 20:27
  Yeah, I'm struck by your emphasis on the fact of staying with experience and of the continual inquiry.
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  And I think for myself, the difference between knowledge questions, wisdom questions, knowledge questions kind of go to the head and there's one time answer to wisdom questions, which it seems like you're asking, is all that this inquiry is
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  has no end.
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  That every time you ask or look, there's a possibility of a further opening and revelation.
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  That's the beauty of the now.
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  Now is very, very interesting.
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  There's the quote of the day.
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  And if you are interested in what is happening right now, that now is the point of departure that enables another dimension to come into play.
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  And so that nowness of what's happening right now, I'm interested in what I am at this moment, who I'm taking myself to be.
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  Why am I having this reaction?
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  How is that happening?
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  How does that relate to what isn't now, the past and this and that?
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  It begins to bring that light in and that illuminates the next step.
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  You don't have to try to figure out the next step.
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  The next step comes and you step into the unknown and the step emerges.
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  But it is the now that's so interesting.
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  But people say, oh, what about that?
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  And what about that?
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  And I want to get over there and you're totally leaving everything.
• 22:04
  That is actually the most interesting and the most necessary question, which is what's happening now?
• 22:13
  Yeah, see, that's how it is sort of different from many of the traditional spiritual practices, where the now is the result.
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  You want to get to the now instead of start of the now.
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  Many spiritual practices are oriented to a particular state.
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  You know, you do the kundalini to get to some kind of expansion of the uppermost chakra, or you do some kind of chant or visualization to basically to attend to a particular state.
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  So most spiritual practices are oriented towards and looking beyond the now to something begin here, now.
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  But they're oriented towards something where else they're getting someplace.
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  And inquiry.
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  If you do that, you stop the inquiry.
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  It's more like inquiry is your interest.
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  It is what is there now.
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  The ordinary now is presenting.
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  And the ordinary now has always the now of light in it.
• 23:17
  Yeah.
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  It's not someplace else.
• 23:19
  But someone listening might say, well, you talk about practice of presence and that you need to deepen and that you.
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  All of these things are also true.
• 23:29
  But what is presence?
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  You're starting with where you are now and sensitizing the consciousness and the body to being more with experience.
• 23:41
  It's to enable you to be more immediate with now, to be more conscious now.
• 23:48
  Yeah.
• 23:49
  And you're implying that this is a fundamental skill which most of us have.
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  Very underdeveloped in the simple capacity of being with our experience and looking into it deeply and just as an association.
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  I keep thinking that what Jesus said 2,000 years ago, the truth will set you free, is one of the most compact bits of wisdom that's hit the planet.
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  And how do you do that?
• 24:19
  But the other thing is that God, my mind just went blank.
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  That's important to allow the blank to really not adhere to what the wish looks like, but to feel the wish to feel the desire for liberation or freedom.
• 24:44
  That desire is a force in the heart.
• 24:48
  But the mind starts to massage it and put it into certain orientation of trying to get somewhere.
• 24:57
  And that is a very survival kind of mechanism that we have.
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  We've been able to develop as human beings.
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  Because we can anticipate, we can assume, we can put together a logical progression of how things are going to work and go and all of that.
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  But to investigate inwardly, we need to be able to suspend those things so that the desire can open up to the force that's attempting to come forward.
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  That.
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  That's actually a very important force.
• 25:34
  Instead of trying to get rid of desire that's part of a force of inquiry, is to feel that desire.
• 25:41
  Desire has a love in it.
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  And that love is the force of true nature coming through as that feeling, saying, I want you, I want you to know me.
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  I am home.
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  I am the only one.
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  Love me for all that I am.
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  And I will take you everywhere you want to be.
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  I will take you home.
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  And that desire is the thing that can continue to arise and emerge in a way that allows that depth to occur.
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  That's why loving the truth is important, because the love has the force in it.
• 26:22
  I just want to acknowledge Feels like a beautiful transmission of.
• 26:27
  It's like, oh, yes, thank you.
• 26:30
  Yeah.
• 26:32
  You know, another teaching that has inquiry is Krishnamurti.
• 26:37
  He talked about inquiry.
• 26:39
  Krishnamurti did inquiry, and he practiced inquiry.
• 26:43
  And he was teaching inquiry, but nobody could learn it.
• 26:46
  Because his inquiry is that you want to inquire into the now, but you have to do it by silencing all the conditioning from the past.
• 26:58
  You have to sort of look at it without the interest from the past or the projection.
• 27:04
  You have to look just now.
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  That's how he did it.
• 27:07
  But you see, nobody could do it without the influence of the past.
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  And so the difference between our inquiry and his is that we inquire with all of it into all of it.
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  Not just the now, but the influences of the past themselves.
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  We inquiring into them.
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  It's okay to look into how the past influences the present.
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  And it's an important part of our inquiry is to see that most of our people experience is mostly influenced by experiences in the past.
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  And so the inquiry begins by looking first at experience.
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  And that can take us to, well, I'm feeling this way or not, because something happened in the past.
• 27:48
  So the inquiry goes into the past and look what's happened.
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  How is it connected?
• 27:53
  You see, a Christian Monti wouldn't do that.
• 27:56
  He wanted always to stay in the present, which is turned out was a limitation, because nobody could do it that way.
• 28:05
  He was able to do it for some reason, when nobody could just completely give up their past and look at the present.
• 28:12
  So.
• 28:13
  And the past is a big part of what we inquire into.
• 28:17
  Not that we go into the past, the influences of the past, but the.
• 28:21
  Influences are part of what we take to be now.
• 28:25
  For us, the person we believe we are, the identity that we have, is all a bunch of pictures and stories that are all compressed into what we believe is true now.
• 28:40
  So we go into that now, and we recognize that that now is not the now of now, it's the now of the past, but it's occluding the now.
• 28:50
  And that becomes so more and more gets illuminated of what is not true.
• 28:57
  I remember when we met, Krishnamurti understood where the difference come from.
• 29:04
  You see, the inquiry, it turns out like in our work, has to do with one of the diamond vehicles.
• 29:13
  We talked about diamond vehicles.
• 29:14
  We talked about it before in the other book, which are vehicles of being, of consciousness that has in it all the qualities that are appearing in a certain way, a certain kind of functionality.
• 29:28
  When we met him, and he was beautiful, openness presence and all that.
• 29:36
  And we saw that vehicle in him.
• 29:39
  However, that vehicle in him was completely clear, no colors.
• 29:45
  And what did you take from that?
• 29:47
  It does the clarity of consciousness in the moment and our inquiry, the vehicle for us arises.
• 29:56
  It can be clear, but it can have all other colors.
• 29:59
  And the colors, all the qualities, somehow make it possible to look into past experience, to allow it, how we understood that.
• 30:08
  I'd like to.
• 30:09
  There's a mysterious paragraph in your book that talks about Krishnamurti, and you don't really talk about it, but it sounds like.
• 30:16
  I mean, let me just read it and I'll shut up.
• 30:18
  It says, Krishnamurti was an example of enlightened teachers we encountered who had the propensity for remaining on the established course even after having experiences that challenge their own views.
• 30:33
  Wow, that's.
• 30:34
  What is that about?
• 30:37
  That's a good question.
• 30:41
  What do you think?
• 30:42
  Well, that people get stuck on, you know, their path, what they've taught, and then they have experiences that would maybe validate the other colors that Hameed was talking about.
• 30:51
  But they know.
• 30:52
  They want to bring it back to their revelation and what they feel is their path.
• 30:58
  And they.
• 30:58
  They close themselves down from other information that might lead them to a more expanded grasp of reality.
• 31:04
  Maybe I could.
• 31:05
  Karen, Could I maybe expand that and say that for me, it feels like this is a potential.
• 31:11
  A really serious potential trap that can happen to some of the real greats.
• 31:16
  You describe Krishnamurti, but I think of also Einstein, who, for many people, he is one of the greatest intellectual geniuses of all times.
• 31:27
  But for many people, he was regard.
• 31:30
  Or many physicists, as I understand it, regard him as having become so fixated on his.
• 31:37
  What, his program, that he didn't really open to the implications of quantum physics.
• 31:43
  And maybe you would speak skillfully to this.
• 31:46
  Well, he did.
• 31:48
  His equations showed it, but he didn't agree with them.
• 31:54
  People are still using his equations anyway.
• 31:58
  But I have to say, back to the teachings.
• 32:02
  The same thing happened to us.
• 32:06
  The same thing happened where we would reach a certain level of consciousness.
• 32:11
  It was like, this is basic.
• 32:13
  This is it.
• 32:14
  This is what's happening.
• 32:15
  And we've done it for, I think, the purposes of the teaching itself.
• 32:23
  We'd get whacked upside the head, and experiences that would challenge that basis came along.
• 32:30
  And because there was such a interest and being kind of bludgeoned at times by these other experiences that we couldn't help but ask the question, what is this?
• 32:43
  And not wanting to leave where we were, the bliss, the beauty, the magic of feeling the Absolute.
• 32:52
  For instance, it was like, I never want to leave.
• 32:56
  This is my heart's desire.
• 32:58
  I'm done.
• 32:59
  I'm home.
• 33:00
  But then other things began to happen that were very disconcerting and took many, many, many years to go through.
• 33:08
  So as I kind of back out and look at other teachings, there may be a purpose for staying on track and not going into other things.
• 33:19
  To become an expert in a certain thing, you have to kind of dismiss other possibilities for a while.
• 33:27
  Maybe that is important for some reason.
• 33:30
  Maybe there's nothing wrong with that.
• 33:32
  But for our teaching, we could not help but move into the next phase.
• 33:39
  And it meant great losses along the way.
• 33:42
  That's one of the dramatic points of your book, Karen, is how you guys were abiding in the Absolute.
• 33:48
  And Hameed, you're like, I don't want anything else.
• 33:51
  I desire nothing.
• 33:52
  I'm here.
• 33:53
  This is just it.
• 33:55
  And that started to go away, and there's this tremendous loss, like, oh, my God.
• 34:01
  And it begins that part of the journey you call the descent, where you go back, the journey continues, and you were left with.
• 34:10
  Well, there was stuff left for you to do, Hameed.
• 34:13
  You were here to share what you were learning.
• 34:15
  So it wasn't just about your own personal realization, but you had to be brought back in the world so that you could share with others.
• 34:21
  And it's a really powerful part of the story for me.
• 34:25
  I feel teary just thinking about.
• 34:27
  I mean, that magic of that is so amazing.
• 34:34
  And I think the fact that this teaching is erupting during this time, it's necessary for the full depth and breadth of it as far as we can take it anyway, in this lifetime, Time is necessary.
• 34:50
  And it doesn't mean that everyone's going to be moving through it the same way.
• 34:54
  But I think all the possibilities are being displayed as much as possible.
• 34:59
  But there are so many losses, and they get greater and greater along the way, not less.
• 35:07
  In certain respects, that was one of the greatest losses.
• 35:12
  I think all of this also shows that in this path, important thing is the teaching, not the individual who is realized.
• 35:23
  The teaching is what makes things happen.
• 35:25
  Teaching has its own force, its own dynamism, its own power, that manifest thing, you know, like we're staying in some place, we establish and then change what changes it.
• 35:37
  It's not like we were wanting to change it.
• 35:40
  We thought that's it.
• 35:41
  But something else changed it.
• 35:43
  They made it happen.
• 35:45
  And that's also something I wanted to say about writing this book.
• 35:49
  I left lots of experiences out.
• 35:52
  I left lots of my own stories out.
• 35:55
  It was really about how any experience was relevant to the teaching.
• 36:01
  So it really isn't an autobiography.
• 36:05
  It really was only the relevance of Hameed's story, my story and those around us and how that led to the teaching.
• 36:15
  So it isn't meant to be about us.
• 36:17
  It's about how that through line opened and developed and grew and has come to pass as really nourishing so many people.
• 36:30
  It is an interesting phenomena because for most tradition, most people who enter spirituality, a teaching is usually associated with a person.
• 36:40
  The person sort of, you know, started it.
• 36:42
  And that's.
• 36:43
  I mean, that's the way you refer to us.
• 36:45
  We established it, we created it all was not true.
• 36:50
  We didn't.
• 36:51
  It came, did not create.
• 36:54
  When I heard that, I went, wait a minute, no, no.
• 36:57
  Creation, no.
• 36:59
  And.
• 36:59
  And founders.
• 37:01
  It's like, well, it found us.
• 37:03
  We didn't found it.
• 37:05
  Yeah, you know, I experienced myself that the teaching made me.
• 37:10
  I mean, it is not only until later, inquiry, whatever, even throughout my life, it was preparing me.
• 37:19
  Going to the sciences wasn't really my choice.
• 37:23
  It was the teaching wanting me to get to that mindset.
• 37:27
  My motorcycle accident that happened.
• 37:30
  I didn't seek it.
• 37:31
  It was the teaching making it happen.
• 37:34
  All these things, you know, the teaching was sort of molding us from before we even manifested some other teaching.
• 37:41
  And then more explicitly as the teaching was arising by changing our view.
• 37:48
  You know, we have.
• 37:49
  Because each realization has its view, as many teachings talk about.
• 37:52
  The view of Dzogchen, for instance, the view in every Vedanta.
• 37:58
  Each religious has its view.
• 37:59
  And many people, the reason why it doesn't change, they stay with the view.
• 38:05
  They take the view to be the final view.
• 38:08
  And for us, for some reason, we weren't stuck with a view.
• 38:13
  There is a view, but it wasn't rigid.
• 38:16
  And so the teaching could always break through it and change the view itself.
• 38:20
  I'm remembering another person who did the inquiry was Ramana Maharshi.
• 38:25
  And the inquiry is very particular, very pointed, which is, who am I?
• 38:31
  And you keep asking the Krish, who am I?
• 38:33
  Until you get to the final where there's no nothing else comes.
• 38:37
  And that's for him getting into the silence of the absolute.
• 38:42
  And he lived there.
• 38:43
  And that's what he taught quietly of the stillness and peace.
• 38:47
  And that was his function.
• 38:50
  So it wasn't like he was limited.
• 38:51
  That was his function to be that.
• 38:53
  And he had, he found, come for inquiry to teach his students.
• 38:58
  That is consistent with the place he was in.
• 39:02
  You're bringing in the varieties of inquiry here.
• 39:05
  And it does seem that this is some sort of inquiry as common across many traditions, both contemplative and psychotherapeutic.
• 39:14
  Of course, it's a, you know, some sort of inquiry into experience as a key element of many experiential therapies.
• 39:22
  And of course in it's investigation, as it's called, is a central element of the insight practice of Buddhist meditation.
• 39:31
  But there's a distinctive.
• 39:34
  You're pointing out they're different.
• 39:35
  Each of them has a different focus and emphasis and even attitude.
• 39:42
  An expectation of what will happen.
• 39:45
  Yeah, an expectation.
• 39:47
  Where is this going to take you?
• 39:49
  We don't have an expectation.
• 39:50
  We don't know what it's going to take us.
• 39:52
  Usually we sort of blind all the time until we see something.
• 39:57
  Yeah.
• 39:58
  And there seems to be just a sense of.
• 40:00
  I don't know how to put this without sounding really religious, but divine guidance, I mean, this was not your guy's plan.
• 40:06
  This was something that was shaping you in order to deliver what you're here to deliver.
• 40:13
  And I think eventually you began to realize that and have faith and trust and that you were being fundamentally supported for something greater than yourselves to give something that needed to be given.
• 40:26
  You know, that's how I'm reading.
• 40:28
  That's what I feel.
• 40:29
  I just finished the book like 15 minutes before this, so I'm still kind of in an altered state.
• 40:33
  It's a really amazing book.
• 40:34
  I think one thing to note is that we didn't think of that at the time.
• 40:40
  We were just doing what we were doing.
• 40:43
  We were riding the wave, feeling blessed, you could say fortunate.
• 40:50
  But we didn't have the view that something was emerging through us or others that were participating at the time that was a teaching and going to have an impact like it has.
• 41:05
  And we were really just step by step.
• 41:08
  We were really day by day, what's happening.
• 41:12
  We didn't have a big picture of the impact or something.
• 41:18
  Moving through all of this is really.
• 41:20
  In hindsight.
• 41:22
  Yeah.
• 41:22
  We didn't know it was a teaching till at some point became clear.
• 41:26
  It was so obvious at some point, but it wasn't.
• 41:29
  There was no ambition involved and no big picture about it.
• 41:35
  And you know, I'm really struck by what you're saying and some parallels because I had somehow the privilege of knowing quite well the people who brought through the curiously titled path titled A Course in Miracles, which is a
• 41:50
  Christian contemplative oriented.
• 41:52
  But the parallels are striking.
• 41:54
  Again, it was two people, a man and a woman.
• 41:57
  They were not Planning on doing this.
• 41:59
  Like you.
• 42:01
  Like you, they were not aware at first that they were receiving something that was not just for themselves.
• 42:07
  And like you, they had no sense that it was.
• 42:11
  They were doing it.
• 42:12
  In fact, of course, miracles books are put out anonymously without their names on them specifically.
• 42:19
  Now the process was somewhat different.
• 42:21
  It was more of a woman who was an atheist Jew getting this Christian message.
• 42:28
  And, you know, I mean, there were preliminary experiences of somewhat psychic experiences and visionary experiences that happened in response to the fact that they were having a horrible relationship.
• 42:41
  He was chair of psychology at Columbia Medical School.
• 42:44
  She was a professor.
• 42:46
  They hated each other.
• 42:47
  And he finally said one day, there's gotta be a better way of living than this.
• 42:51
  And I'm determined to find it.
• 42:53
  And she said, well, I agree and I'll help.
• 42:55
  And then that presaged a series of visionary experiences.
• 43:00
  And three months later, she heard the words, this is a course in miracles.
• 43:04
  Please take notes.
• 43:06
  She thought she was going crazy.
• 43:08
  But over six years there was the dictation, which does seem to be a path unto itself.
• 43:16
  And now is like the Diamond Approach has followers around the world.
• 43:22
  So I have to say I've been studying it every day for 40 years.
• 43:27
  So I hope it's a good path.
• 43:30
  Well, what's interesting to me is being able to speak with you about the book and the path and all of that has taken me to very interesting thoughts about those early days and first meeting Hameed.
• 43:45
  And I came up with a word that actually says something about what it felt like when I met him was an immediate sense of.
• 43:56
  A felt sense of recognition.
• 44:00
  Immediate recognition.
• 44:02
  There were many, many other things that I spoke of last time about what it was like to meet him and the innocence that was there and about him.
• 44:10
  But what really transpired was an immediate sense of recognition.
• 44:15
  And then I didn't see him for years.
• 44:17
  And then the next time I did, that recognition was there.
• 44:21
  But that same feeling of a certain illuminated sense of recognition.
• 44:26
  Not mental, not even emotional, but it was that feeling.
• 44:32
  So it's been very interesting being able to really explore and kind of unpack things with you guys.
• 44:38
  But I think another element that's really important that I wanted to also speak of is something about the individual consciousness that's misunderstood often as ego.
• 44:53
  We don't see that as ego.
• 44:56
  So I know we talked about it last time.
• 44:58
  We're talking about consciousness now and our historical framework.
• 45:02
  It can all sound very individualistic and ego oriented in the sense of being an individual.
• 45:11
  However, for our work, our individual consciousness is the human Soul is human consciousness that can be formed as ego, can identify with history and structures that develop, but can also be dismantled.
• 45:31
  And we can feel that sense of consciousness as a substance in and of itself.
• 45:37
  And that's the site of experience, the locus of experience.
• 45:42
  That no matter how expansive you are, no matter how much you are everything you are, the depth, the absolute, that's your experience.
• 45:52
  It's nobody else's experience.
• 45:54
  You might be everything, but the you that's over there might not be experiencing the same thing.
• 45:59
  That's you.
• 46:00
  That's right here.
• 46:02
  So that's a very, very compact little kind of note of what we take to be human consciousness.
• 46:11
  And that begins as a located identification with history and all of these other things, but can be actually opened up and go beyond that history and expand out and be much, much more.
• 46:30
  Of course, that's one of the remarkable things again in the book, fresh in my mind toward the end of the book, where you start to realize.
• 46:37
  Before there was a lot of boundless, absolute.
• 46:40
  All this stuff, big, big stuff.
• 46:42
  And at some point, I think you were meditating or something, Hameed, and this subtle thing passed in front of your eyes.
• 46:47
  And you started to explore that.
• 46:48
  And that's where you guys realize what you chose to call the human soul.
• 46:53
  The significance of the individual as being part and parcel of the absolute.
• 46:58
  They're like two sides of the same coin.
• 47:01
  And that was a kind of revelation.
• 47:02
  And I think that really.
• 47:04
  Anyway, that's always really impressed me.
• 47:05
  And everything matters.
• 47:07
  Everybody matters.
• 47:08
  The individual soul matters.
• 47:10
  And the way that you.
• 47:12
  That was kind of revealed to you didn't kind of start off with that.
• 47:14
  But later it came part of the foundations, if you can have foundations of something that's so, you know, evolutionary.
• 47:22
  But it seemed to.
• 47:23
  It appeared in the book, and I was really.
• 47:25
  That's a great chapter in the book, by the way, where you talk about the soul.
• 47:28
  Yeah, it's like.
• 47:29
  Well, yeah, it not only matters, it is material, it's spiritual matter.
• 47:34
  And it is an actual feel of consciousness, a substance of consciousness that without.
• 47:44
  I mean, who is it that is searching?
• 47:47
  Who is it that is.
• 47:49
  Or what is it that is desiring its nature?
• 47:53
  What is it that's on this journey?
• 47:55
  Is it ego?
• 47:57
  Really?
• 47:58
  That's all.
• 47:58
  Well, there's something else that, yes, can be structured as ego, but the desire is the living nature of that consciousness that is desiring its immediate connection to its nature.
• 48:15
  That is felt as separate because of ego.
• 48:19
  But when that ignition happens in the human soul, that substance is.
• 48:27
  And like, I was Saying before that force of desire is what enlivens the journey home.
• 48:35
  So the human soul becomes the lens for true nature to live and be in the world and not of it.
• 48:47
  That it.
• 48:48
  It's like the human.
• 48:51
  The human soul is that which gives true nature life, the living nature.
• 48:59
  And you're pointing to something, Karen, which to me is one of the beauties of this path is the all inclusiveness, that there's an honoring of all this.
• 49:09
  And at a more metaphysical level, there's not a denigration is too strong a word.
• 49:15
  But simply seeing the material world and life, et cetera, as illusory in some way.
• 49:21
  Yeah.
• 49:21
  It's like, why would true nature create illusion?
• 49:26
  So it can know itself.
• 49:30
  Does a lot of curious things.
• 49:33
  It does, but it.
• 49:34
  It can be true to itself in a smaller venue.
• 49:42
  Yeah.
• 49:43
  Eminence and transcendence we talk about.
• 49:45
  And it really.
• 49:45
  And you've said that quite a few times, you know that that motorcycle that hit you was not an illusion.
• 49:50
  It was really a motorcycle.
• 49:53
  And then you flying into another dimension.
• 49:56
  And you probably died during that experience.
• 49:59
  But you decided to live.
• 50:00
  Something called you back to life.
• 50:02
  And that was where you start, I think the first intimations that you had something important to bring forward in your.
• 50:09
  Life for us and others, as recognition.
• 50:13
  Right.
• 50:14
  So what are you experiencing now?
• 50:16
  I don't want to say anything stupid that will interrupt Hameed from saying something really brilliant.
• 50:20
  That's what I was thinking about.
• 50:22
  I don't have anything else to say.
• 50:23
  I guess you said it yourself.
• 50:26
  Okay.
• 50:27
  Thank you.
• 50:28
  Okay.
• 50:29
  Let's see.
• 50:30
  Karen, we talked last time about the first intense experience of presence you had, when Hameed essentially transmitted that sense to you.
• 50:43
  But what we didn't talk about was something you say in the book.
• 50:46
  And I was so struck by it I wrote it out, that what happened to me that night was not really an experience.
• 50:54
  It was the awakening of a force, a drive that continued unbidden.
• 51:00
  Amid's transmission initiated the unstoppable process of illumination for me.
• 51:05
  The presence opened my consciousness and it has never left.
• 51:11
  It's remained steadfast since its first appearance.
• 51:14
  It has its own intelligence that continues to flow into the nooks and crannies and bring into the light what has been unconscious, whirling the inside out as it destroys cherished illusions.
• 51:28
  There's a lot in that I'd love to have your response.
• 51:32
  I think one thing is to say that I had had experiences of different ways Presence had shown up, but they were intermittent and wafting, almost like the perfumes we call it the Lataif.
• 51:49
  And many people don't experience this level.
• 51:52
  It's a very beautiful level of just feeling the wisps and the whispers of presence.
• 51:57
  But this one really connected something, ignited something.
• 52:01
  And I think that what I'm speaking to there has to do with how the teaching just started to move and didn't stop and was throwing things up for me to notice, to see, to investigate, that I couldn't any
• 52:16
  longer look away.
• 52:17
  So that's when I felt like the collaboration really began, even though it had started prior in terms of conversations.
• 52:26
  This is when our souls began to intertwine in a way where different processes were shared.
• 52:34
  And even though he was at that time, further along the way, the conversations became more and more mutual.
• 52:44
  It was a kind of force that kept the inquiry focused and kept my interest.
• 52:52
  Even when things got very rough from time to time.
• 52:56
  And it's easy to get scared, to look away, to try to disengage from the whole thing.
• 53:04
  Something did not let me.
• 53:06
  And that's really what I was trying to say there, is that it was really a force that was bigger than my fear.
• 53:13
  It was bigger than my aggression.
• 53:15
  It was bigger than my own ideas, my wishes, the way they appeared, at least at the surface, all of those things.
• 53:25
  So it won.
• 53:26
  Basically, you're kind of drawn away from it for a while.
• 53:29
  You're geographically at a different place.
• 53:31
  I think down by Santa Cruz, you had a very fulfilling marriage.
• 53:34
  And it sounds like you were, you know, guys were getting along fine, and you kind of went away from that because of this other life, but you were, as you were saying, you were just drawn back to it.
• 53:45
  But we were on the phone all the time.
• 53:47
  I mean, by.
• 53:47
  At that point, you know, you're tethered to the wall because you're.
• 53:53
  Many people who might be listening to this have no idea what a phone was like in the 1980s, but you didn't move around too much.
• 54:03
  Well, maybe by the 80s, you had the phones that were near the bases, but we were speaking a lot still and visiting.
• 54:10
  But I just started driving up, and pretty soon it was every week.
• 54:15
  And then eventually the marriage dissolved because I was just too intent on being up in Berkeley and continuing the conversations.
• 54:24
  That's really when things started to get galvanized much more.
• 54:28
  I didn't know that I'd be as involved with the group as I was when I moved from Colorado, but I just couldn't stay away.
• 54:36
  And Hameed was even surprised, not by our relationship continuing and our investigation, but the fact That I was just drawn to being there.
• 54:45
  Yeah, it was important that you were there, apparently.
• 54:47
  Yeah, it became more and more so.
• 54:49
  At the beginning, I was just sort of a fly on the wall.
• 54:52
  I had no interest in teaching and he was the only teacher that was teaching.
• 54:56
  And that was fine with me.
• 54:57
  I had no trouble with that.
• 54:59
  I sat in the back and I looked around and I observed and we talked about what was happening in the group and what could be the next steps and what would be interesting to do and, you know, those
• 55:11
  kinds of things.
• 55:11
  And then he asked me to step in at some point, which I did not want to do, actually.
• 55:17
  I didn't want to teach or sit with people in that way.
• 55:22
  And I mean, I had been working privately with folks, doing some inquiry sessions, but I did not feel that I really wanted to teach.
• 55:31
  And that was a force that brought me in.
• 55:34
  He said, I need you to.
• 55:37
  I can't do all of this by myself.
• 55:40
  And so I did, kicking and screaming.
• 55:44
  At first, I was quite content at the back of the room.
• 55:49
  Thank you.
• 55:50
  Thank you for that.
• 55:51
  Well, yes, bless you both for going head first, kicking and screaming, as you may have.
• 55:57
  Karen, you mentioned that along with, as you described that the impact of that presence, which really feels like this experience of presence was.
• 56:07
  It wasn't a state, it was now a station, a permanent way of being, if I'm reading it correctly.
• 56:13
  And you mentioned that at that time, presence was a kind of in word in the human potential movement, but it was being used in very different ways and that it didn't have the depth or impact that, as I
• 56:25
  understand anyway, for most other growth movements that the presence did for you both.
• 56:31
  Well, one thing I can say is I don't know that I would say that first experience became a station.
• 56:38
  Okay.
• 56:39
  What I felt was pure presence.
• 56:42
  Pure.
• 56:43
  And it was also an undulating, living presence.
• 56:50
  At the same time.
• 56:51
  What I felt happened at that moment was it ignited my consciousness in a way that that presence began to differentiate itself into the qualities that would push forward and bring out the issues that needed to be seen for
• 57:09
  those qualities to show up.
• 57:11
  So it was pure presence.
• 57:13
  And that pure presence differentiates itself into the qualities.
• 57:19
  And those qualities show up as we work on different sectors of ego structure.
• 57:27
  So that was coming forward.
• 57:29
  Anytime I wanted to sense myself, I could feel presence.
• 57:33
  So you could say, yes, partly it was a station, but it was more that the qualities would become stations.
• 57:39
  And what particular qualities are your.
• 57:41
  Like, strength, like will, love, intelligence, you know, brilliancy, all of these different.
• 57:49
  And joy all of these are various ways.
• 57:53
  Presence differentiates itself.
• 57:56
  And brings out very particular issues that each one will be liberated by.
• 58:03
  And so I would say that presence in general was a station.
• 58:09
  But that pure presence was something that I learned more about as I got into boundlessness.
• 58:16
  And into what we would think of as pure consciousness.
• 58:20
  Just purity of consciousness without quality.
• 58:23
  And it seems like this is one of the unique aspects of the Diamond Approach.
• 58:27
  That there's an appreciation that presence manifests as multiple strengths, essential qualities, et cetera.
• 58:36
  And one of the purposes is really that these qualities are necessary in life.
• 58:43
  Not to just be generic presence.
• 58:46
  But when there's pain, there's a necessity for sensitivity, for kindness.
• 58:52
  When you're in a love relationship, you need to be able to have contact, real contact from a real human being that's present in the now.
• 59:03
  And there's love, different kinds of love, all sorts of love, intelligence.
• 59:08
  To be able to synthesize and analyze and make decisions and all of these kinds of things.
• 59:17
  And to be strong, but to be real.
• 59:20
  Not to just be angry, to get strong.
• 59:22
  But to actually have the fire of strength.
• 59:25
  To set boundaries and to be able to say no.
• 59:28
  And to be strong in ways that has the fire.
• 59:32
  And to be grounded and stable.
• 59:35
  And have a will that isn't just a push.
• 59:38
  But has a stable confidence to it.
• 59:42
  So all of these qualities are ones that actually don't just enrich our life, but they give us real life.
• 59:49
  So for our work, being a real human being, being a true human being, a complete human being.
• 59:54
  Requires that we are able to express and be those qualities.
• 1:00:01
  In addition to not having to be.
• 1:00:04
  Any of them beautiful.
• 1:00:06
  And you have beside you, I think, the symbol of the complete human being.
• 1:00:13
  And thanks to you, I have one that you gave me my birthday.
• 1:00:17
  So thank you very much.
• 1:00:18
  You're welcome.
• 1:00:20
  As you said, you said before we started.
• 1:00:22
  Yeah, I said, I'm hoping it rubs off.
• 1:00:24
  And you said, well, maybe it'll rub in.
• 1:00:26
  Which is a better way of seeing it.
• 1:00:29
  But maybe you'd speak to the symbol and what it tells us.
• 1:00:33
  You know, this is another example.
• 1:00:36
  It brings to mind that this is another example of how the teaching is manifesting itself according to its own intelligence.
• 1:00:46
  Its own teaching has come here through some individual, but it has a direction.
• 1:00:52
  And the direction is not just realization, awakening, but awakening that lives life, neural human life.
• 1:01:00
  Ramana Maharshi, for instance, that wasn't the teaching that he was coming.
• 1:01:04
  The teaching for him was to come and go into the silence and peace.
• 1:01:08
  And just stay there.
• 1:01:10
  Wasn't known to be somebody who lives life and deal with things, you know, he has to be taken care of for us.
• 1:01:17
  We're not taken care of.
• 1:01:19
  We take care of ourselves and we live normal, ordinary lives.
• 1:01:23
  But that is not our choice.
• 1:01:24
  It's not like I thought we wanted to be that way.
• 1:01:27
  That was the teaching itself, doing it, and we just followed it.
• 1:01:32
  What else are we going to do?
• 1:01:33
  That was the teaching.
• 1:01:34
  And then, I mean, if the teaching was saying, well, just be in silence and standing your house, don't come out, I would have done it.
• 1:01:42
  But that wasn't what it was.
• 1:01:45
  The teaching wasn't about that.
• 1:01:47
  Yeah, Hameed was never really excited about sitting in front of a bunch of people.
• 1:01:52
  That wasn't his thing at all.
• 1:01:55
  Well, thank God he did.
• 1:01:57
  It does bring in, again, the whole question of true nature and what it means to be in the world.
• 1:02:04
  And the appreciation of the preciousness of individual consciousness.
• 1:02:09
  Not just the necessity for true nature to be able to be known by something, but just the beauty of what human consciousness is and what it can be and the tremendous dimensionality of our consciousness.
• 1:02:28
  It's really quite touching.
• 1:02:30
  And to dismiss it as an illusion just feels so nasty.
• 1:02:36
  Really dismissive of something important.
• 1:02:38
  It's really dismissive.
• 1:02:40
  You know, if you remember, Karen, there was a time in the 80s, we were working in ego structures and ego and identity and all that and working through it.
• 1:02:51
  But at some point we were wondering, well, I mean, that doesn't explain it.
• 1:02:56
  There's something.
• 1:02:57
  Who's that?
• 1:02:59
  What is structured?
• 1:03:01
  You know, and we didn't know.
• 1:03:03
  We didn't even have the concept of soul in our mind.
• 1:03:05
  It's more like there must be something.
• 1:03:08
  It can't be just an ego individual, because it seems to dissolve and then.
• 1:03:12
  But then something, you know, attaches and become individual.
• 1:03:17
  And we didn't know.
• 1:03:19
  We spent several years wondering what could be.
• 1:03:23
  How do we explain that?
• 1:03:24
  And didn't arise till you went deeply into the Absolute.
• 1:03:29
  That's what John was talking about earlier.
• 1:03:31
  That it took getting into the Absolute for us to recognize that the individual consciousness was what it was.
• 1:03:41
  It took that for us.
• 1:03:43
  Yeah.
• 1:03:43
  There were two things that arose within the Absolute.
• 1:03:46
  Usually the Absolute manifests.
• 1:03:48
  Everything has its surface.
• 1:03:50
  The soul manifested within it, like within its own space.
• 1:03:54
  And there was another thing that at some point later manifested, which was what we call the Vajra body.
• 1:04:00
  It was not part of those, were not part of the surface.
• 1:04:03
  And what's interesting is there's a very intimate and important relationship between the Vajrabhat and the soul, the Vajra body is the particularity of the individual.
• 1:04:15
  But it has to do with a certain kind of maturation of the soul, which maybe we'll have another chance to talk about.
• 1:04:22
  But I think let's back up into our who symbol here, which has to do with the complete human being.
• 1:04:32
  And it shows up first as the pearl beyond price, that the pearl beyond price is the actual true human being.
• 1:04:44
  The personal sense of what it means to be a person that's real, a person of being.
• 1:04:54
  So it's not a person in the sense that we usually think of history.
• 1:04:58
  We usually think of the shape of this body.
• 1:05:01
  It's really a form of consciousness that has contactfulness, personalness, but not a story about oneself.
• 1:05:10
  It's a personal that feels like a real contactful presence.
• 1:05:17
  Like you're here with me.
• 1:05:21
  Literally that the stuff of you and the stuff of me is one and the same.
• 1:05:27
  But I am what I am.
• 1:05:31
  It's a m ness, a beingness.
• 1:05:34
  And you are the presence of your own luminous beingness.
• 1:05:40
  And that contact is the purity of contact, the purity of presence itself.
• 1:05:46
  So it's really such a precious sense of what it means to be a person in the world and divine at once.
• 1:05:57
  A luminous precious pearl.
• 1:06:00
  It can show up as a roundness if you feel like a fullness.
• 1:06:05
  And there's such a sense of richness in it.
• 1:06:09
  So it's pearly looking and feels luminous, but it has like a squishiness to it a little bit.
• 1:06:17
  It's not like hard, but it's got just a bit of give.
• 1:06:21
  And it's just a.
• 1:06:23
  It shows the ways in which human beings are really made of the good, that we are bathed in the good and made of the good.
• 1:06:34
  And that can be more and more diamondized.
• 1:06:39
  Meaning that as we integrate true nature and the precision and knowledge of being, it becomes more and more faceted.
• 1:06:50
  And that facetedness takes on a characteristic of clarity and precision and being a real, objective human being, not without quality, not without love.
• 1:07:05
  But that love is objective, has a purity to it.
• 1:07:11
  And the different ways in which human beings have mind can become clearer, more precise, cleaner, less taken in by the world and more nourished by divine.
• 1:07:26
  And the body too can feel faceted.
• 1:07:30
  So the person continues to develop in our work from the precious pearl, showing up within what we call the first turning.
• 1:07:38
  But it can develop and grow and become more and more precise and objective.
• 1:07:45
  And the hu symbol is who is the secret name of God.
• 1:07:52
  Hameed might have a little more precise Knowledge of this.
• 1:07:56
  But it's written four times.
• 1:07:58
  Each segment is the who it's written.
• 1:08:02
  I have interpreted this as the four centers.
• 1:08:07
  No one said it is.
• 1:08:09
  This is completely my subjective experience.
• 1:08:11
  But for me, the complete human being has body, heart and mind as one unit, indivisible functioning together.
• 1:08:20
  That lights up that fourth center, which has to do with life.
• 1:08:24
  To me, that is the complete human being that has the belly, heart and mind functioning and operating in the world, but from the divine.
• 1:08:38
  So that the who symbol is all of the possibilities for the human being and always, always settled in the depth of its nature.
• 1:08:50
  Oh, that's such a beautiful description.
• 1:08:52
  Thank you so much, Karen, deeply.
• 1:08:56
  Oh, simple is, as Karen said, it has in it the word who, which is, according to the Sufis, The Quran mentioned 99 names of God.
• 1:09:09
  They say there is another name which is a secret name, and that is hope.
• 1:09:15
  And the whole is here repeated four times, basically through mirror images, makes a cross of who really.
• 1:09:23
  And that is the inner nature of the individual.
• 1:09:27
  That's the idea here.
• 1:09:28
  The whole simple and the complete human being, but made out of the deepest.
• 1:09:34
  It's the depth coming through as a.
• 1:09:36
  Person, the depth of our spirituality.
• 1:09:39
  Where does this symbol come from?
• 1:09:41
  Is it ancient or is it.
• 1:09:43
  It might be.
• 1:09:43
  It might exist before the Quran.
• 1:09:46
  You know, we saw it on the COVID of Ibri Shah's book.
• 1:09:50
  Yeah, well, I mean, the symbol.
• 1:09:52
  Yes, the symbol.
• 1:09:54
  But he had it backwards.
• 1:09:55
  Yeah.
• 1:09:56
  The symbol was created by the Naqsha Bendi Sufis, you know, in northern Afghanistan.
• 1:10:03
  There were Naqshbandis, which started, you know, 12, 13th century, which is one of the main lineages of the Sufis that combined mind and heart too, at the same time.
• 1:10:16
  And they had.
• 1:10:17
  They did many symbols.
• 1:10:18
  Naksha Beni means Naksh nakhsh, which means some kind of design.
• 1:10:23
  So they made many designs.
• 1:10:25
  One of them is this one.
• 1:10:27
  Except, however, the hu was going the other way.
• 1:10:31
  And the other way I looked at it and said, well, that's not how the Arabic hu was written.
• 1:10:36
  For some reason, they inverse it, you know, to have a mirror image of the actual word who.
• 1:10:43
  So I set it back to the way it's usually written and made it our symbol.
• 1:10:48
  So our symbol is derived from an Akshabanti symbol, but not exactly an Akshabanti symbol.
• 1:10:55
  I have a theory about that.
• 1:10:56
  That depends on whether you are true nature peering through the individual consciousness.
• 1:11:03
  It will show up one way.
• 1:11:05
  If you are the individual consciousness facing your nature will show up another way.
• 1:11:11
  Ah, and the Tibetan Buddhist analogy would be Nirvana, which is the recognition in which awareness is recognized, and Samsara, in which it isn't a one.
• 1:11:24
  Or for me, it's just which side are you taking at this moment?
• 1:11:31
  But they're both connected always.
• 1:11:35
  So the complete human being.
• 1:11:37
  Sometimes you feel yourself more at the fore in the world being the individual, but as a true individual and in repose, you're the background peering through the.
• 1:11:52
  Individual consciousness and all the play of the divine.
• 1:11:56
  Beautiful.
• 1:11:57
  Can I bring up just changing the subject?
• 1:12:00
  I mean, this is wonderful, but this is a question that stayed with me, and it's one of the important kind of subplots in this story that you guys started out.
• 1:12:08
  You were a trio.
• 1:12:10
  There was a gentleman called Faisal, and it kind of.
• 1:12:14
  I mean, in the early years of the diamond, up until, I guess, you know, toward the mid-80s, you guys work together and there's a really close correspondence.
• 1:12:23
  And you guys were exploring this all together.
• 1:12:25
  And being a musician, I project my experience of being in bands.
• 1:12:30
  And, you know, it's like Hameed was the lead singer or the main songwriter, but the other guys really brought it into other dimensions that it wouldn't exist without them.
• 1:12:40
  And then, strangely, in the story, he starts to kind of abandon you, Karen.
• 1:12:47
  And then toward the end, he breaks away.
• 1:12:50
  And at one point, you talked about the Mahdi brought up in the book.
• 1:12:54
  And this is.
• 1:12:55
  I had to research this, but the Mahdi is a person in the Islamic tradition that wasn't in the Quran, but came from talks that people jotted down that Muhammad was giving and the Mahdi was a figure in the
• 1:13:07
  end time that would come through and kind of reconcile everything with this massive amount of truth.
• 1:13:14
  And Faisal said to.
• 1:13:16
  To you that, well, maybe you're the body.
• 1:13:20
  And you were like, I don't want to be anything but me.
• 1:13:22
  You know, you didn't go with that at all.
• 1:13:25
  And later on, apparently, according to my research, that he began to feel that he was the Mahdi after he broke away and started his own school.
• 1:13:33
  So I was thinking, it seems like, I don't know, just a inflation of ego and identification with a mythical story that kind of took over and led.
• 1:13:43
  To that break or.
• 1:13:44
  I mean, what do you guys think?
• 1:13:45
  You've had many years.
• 1:13:47
  I usually think of it is that he broke away to do his own thing.
• 1:13:52
  And I don't make a judgment what he's doing his own thing.
• 1:13:57
  So he's doing his own thing.
• 1:13:58
  And I think people who know him, and I'm not much, I stay in touch with him to some degree, but not intimately as it used to be.
• 1:14:08
  We're intimately free.
• 1:14:10
  So for a few years, and then slowly he broke away and he wanted to do his own thing, wanted to be independent.
• 1:14:18
  He wanted me to be just the person and so the central person.
• 1:14:24
  So that's how it works out.
• 1:14:25
  And he's still doing his own thing.
• 1:14:28
  And I don't really know exactly what.
• 1:14:31
  But, you know, I don't think it's a place to make any sort of ideas or suggestions or judgment about what he's doing.
• 1:14:40
  You know, you make your own understanding by studying what he says.
• 1:14:45
  But I think that those first years, we had begun the exploration and Hameed reconnected with Faisal, and it was a beautiful time of exploration and very rich and the backing off.
• 1:15:03
  He never really talked to me about that.
• 1:15:06
  It was mainly between he and Hameed that something was happening.
• 1:15:10
  I read Hameed's journals about it, but just to speak to those first years, when the three of us would hang out together, it was really a magical time.
• 1:15:22
  But I think the discord that happened, and I think there were many things that just weren't discussed.
• 1:15:28
  There were some attempts to discuss them, but clarity didn't happen there.
• 1:15:33
  And that's sad to me, it was a loss.
• 1:15:36
  But, yeah, like Hameed says, he's doing what he said he wanted to do, which was something else and something that he felt called to.
• 1:15:45
  And it was also painful for you, Hameed, when he left, there was a certain.
• 1:15:49
  We were very good friends for a long time.
• 1:15:51
  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:15:53
  So, yeah, I was surprised by it and didn't know there was something broad like that.
• 1:15:58
  And.
• 1:15:59
  But it did happen, and it was a break.
• 1:16:03
  Well, we were like.
• 1:16:05
  All the three of us were working and exploring in sort of mutual harmony and stuff.
• 1:16:11
  So for that to happen was sort of a disruption for a while.
• 1:16:16
  It felt like a tripod.
• 1:16:18
  Lost a leg.
• 1:16:20
  The Beatles broke up.
• 1:16:21
  You know, how could they do that?
• 1:16:23
  Kind of.
• 1:16:24
  There was beauty coming through them.
• 1:16:26
  I think also the teaching was dictating something there because there were certain things that occurred after that departure that I think were really important to happen with a certain synergy between two.
• 1:16:42
  And So, I don't know.
• 1:16:44
  I mean, again, we can look back and see that certain things occurred that were really significant to the teaching and brought out new parts to it.
• 1:16:52
  And clearly there's a mystery to all this that is bottomless.
• 1:16:58
  And.
• 1:16:59
  And somehow out of the two of you and the three of you has come this beautiful path which is just touching so many people, us included, so deep, deep gratitude to you both.
• 1:17:13
  I'm aware you've been talking a lot about inquiry, and of course, it's.
• 1:17:18
  It's sparked the processes we've been going along and just, I've been noticing just this feeling of enormous gratitude and love for this priceless gift.
• 1:17:28
  You have been the instruments for giving us all.
• 1:17:31
  So thank you so much.
• 1:17:33
  And we're barely 100 pages into the book, so definitely to be continued.
• 1:17:39
  Yes, to be continued.
• 1:17:41
  Yeah, it gets even more.
• 1:17:43
  More mysterious as we go along.
• 1:17:46
  Yeah.
• 1:17:46
  It is remarkable, remarkable book.
• 1:17:49
  I've never read anything like it.
• 1:17:50
  It's biographical at the same time, this ongoing revelation of this whole spiritual tradition.
• 1:17:55
  I don't think there's anything like it.
• 1:17:57
  And thank you for being willing to talk about Faisal.
• 1:18:00
  I really appreciated that.
• 1:18:01
  And yeah, it's.
• 1:18:03
  It's its own thing.
• 1:18:04
  I just, like I said, I haven't read every book, but I've never read anything else like this.
• 1:18:08
  Very remarkable book.
• 1:18:09
  And the book again is the Jeweled Path, a biography of the Diamond Approach to inner realization.
• 1:18:16
  And thank you, Karen.
• 1:18:17
  Thank you so very much.
• 1:18:19
  And thank you, Hameed, for the book, for your teachings, for being the being open to allowing this remarkable wisdom to come through you.
• 1:18:27
  Thank you so much.
• 1:18:29
  Yeah, thank you.
• 1:18:30
  And I hope this will be continued.
• 1:18:32
  Our four cornered thing that we have here.
• 1:18:34
  We're a quadrat or something.
• 1:18:36
  Yeah.
• 1:18:37
  We're just beginning to get into this book.
• 1:18:39
  It's really, really remarkable.
• 1:18:40
  And you guys are anyway, extraordinarily gifted us.
• 1:18:44
  And I'm very appreciative.
• 1:18:45
  Yeah.
• 1:18:45
  Lovely to be with you.
• 1:18:47
  It's good for people to know the.
• 1:18:50
  The story of how the teaching happened, how it developed.
• 1:18:55
  Because, you know, I remember for a while when I wrote the first book, people have all kind of ideas made my integration and philosopher.
• 1:19:05
  I combined many teachings, all kinds of stuff.
• 1:19:09
  Nobody knew the truth because it's hard to say it in a very short sentence.
• 1:19:15
  So writing a whole book about it, I think tells really the story.
• 1:19:20
  Yeah.
• 1:19:21
  Thank you so much.
• 1:19:23
  See you next time.
• 1:19:25
  Thank you very much for being a part of this conversation.
• 1:19:29
  We hope that you were moved, as we are moved, being part of it ourselves.
• 1:19:33
  We'd also like to say that this is being funded by Roger myself.
• 1:19:37
  It comes out of our pockets.
• 1:19:38
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• 1:19:44
  Which is steadily growing.
• 1:19:45
  But the more people we can reach and the more marketing we can do, the more positive effect we can have on the world.
• 1:19:50
  So we've done a couple of ways, but we'd like you to buy us a cup of coffee.
• 1:19:54
  Very simple.
• 1:19:55
  And I do that with podcasts that I support, and I find it's very satisfying.
• 1:20:00
  So thank you for your help.
• 1:20:01
  Thank you for your presence and thanking for all you are and all you do.
• 1:20:05
  We love you.