The Unfolding Now
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“Almaas is a genius at revealing both the core qualities of Essence and the veils that obscure it, always in language that helps peel away those veils, always holding open the door to the unfolding presence and awareness that remains when the veils have dissolved. The Unfolding Now leads the reader through a masterful series of inquiry processes, invitations to sense and know ourselves at increasing levels of subtlety, gently walking us deeper and deeper into Truth.”
—Sally Kempton (Durgananda), spiritual teacher and author of The Heart of Meditation: Pathways to a Deeper Experience
“I love the unfolding Almaas! His clarity never diminishes, yet each book brings an increasing simplicity and gentleness. As I worked with this latest material, I felt like I was receiving a transmission of pure compassion. His strong, true voice reminds us that beyond the endless self-improvement projects and idealized mystical states with which the spiritual path is strewn lies the simple but exquisite taste of our own being.”
—Cynthia Bourgeault, author of Mystical Hope, The Wisdom Way of Knowing, and Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening
ABOUT THE BOOK
The keys to self-knowledge and deep contentment are right here before us in this very moment—if we can simply learn to live with open awareness. In The Unfolding Now, A. H. Almaas presents a marvelously effective practice for developing the transformative quality of presence. Through a particular method of self-observation and contemplative exploration that he calls inquiry, we learn to live in the relaxed condition of simply “being ourselves,” without interference from feelings of inadequacy, drivenness toward goals, struggling to figure things out, and rejecting experiences we don't want. Almaas explores the many obstacles that keep us from being present—including defensiveness, ignorance, desire, aggression, and self-hatred—and shows us how to welcome with curiosity and compassion whatever we are experiencing.
A. H. ALMAAS is the pen name of Hameed Ali, the Kuwaiti-born originator of the Diamond Approach, who has been guiding individuals and groups in Colorado, California, and Europe since 1976. He is the author of Spacecrusier Inquiry, The Pearl Beyond Price, Facets of Unity, and other books.
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THE UNFOLDING
NOW
Realizing Your True Nature
through the Practice of Presence
A. H. ALMAAS
SHAMBHALA
BOSTON & LONDON
2012
SHAMBHALA PUBLICATIONS, INC.
Horticultural Hall
300 Massachusetts Avenue
Boston, Massachusetts 02115
www.shambhala.com
© 2008 by A-Hameed Ali
Cover photograph by Corey Kohn
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Almaas, A. H.
The unfolding now: realizing your true nature through the practice of presence / A. H. Almaas. 1st ed.
p. cm. (Diamond Body Series; 3) Includes index.
eISBN 978-0-8348-2557-4
ISBN 978-1-59030-559-1 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Attention. 2. Self. I. Title.
BF321.A46 2008
153.7′5—dc22
2007042699
Dedicated to all the students of the Diamond Approach:
BY LEARNING TO VALUE and appreciate experiencing, knowing, and accepting where you truly are, you give our human potential the opportunity to deepen and soar to heights that humanity greatly needs. It has always been an inspiration for me to see how, by sincerely following a genuine teaching, you provide an opening for reality to reveal its perfections and hence offer the world a glimpse of the harmony possible for it.
Contents
EDITOR’S PREFACE
NOTE TO THE READER
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
1. LOVING THE REAL
Exploration Session: Your Relationship to Being Real
2. LEARNING TO BE REAL
Exploration Session: Bringing Awareness to Where You Are
3. HANDS OFF YOUR EXPERIENCE
Exploration Session: Recognizing Your Own Meddling
4. MAKING SPACE FOR EVERYTHING
Exploration Session: Inviting Allowing into the Moment
5. OPENING TO OURSELVES
Exploration Session: Exploring Vulnerability in the Present
6. CULTIVATING A BOLD VULNERABILITY
Exploration Session: Deepening the Inquiry
7. FOLLOWING TRUTH TO MEANING AND HARMONY
Exploration Session: Discovering How Comparative Judgment Operates in You
8. FINDING TRUE ACCEPTANCE
Exploration Session: Discerning True Acceptance of Your Experience
9. HATRED AND THE POWER TO BE
Exploration Session: Identifying Self-Hatred
10. IGNORANCE AND DIRECT KNOWING
Exploration Session: Recognizing Learned Ignorance and Direct Knowing
11. FREEDOM FROM THE FILTERS OF THE MIND
Exploration Session: Observing What Enhances or Limits the Immediacy of Your Experience
12. THE TRAP OF IDENTIFICATION
Exploration Session: Recognizing Identification in Your Experience
13. LIGHTING UP THE NOW
Exploration Session: The Influence of Future Thinking on Your Experience
14. A MERCURIAL SENSE OF SELF
Exploration Session: Exploring Beliefs about Not Changing
15. THE PERSONAL THREAD OF MEANING
Exploration Session: Considering Your Own Lifeline
16. BEING WITHOUT MIND
Exploration Session: Knowing and Not Knowing
17. TO BE AND NOT TO BE
Exploration Session: Exploring Fluidity and Solidity in Your Experience
18. THE PRECIOUSNESS OF EACH MOMENT
Exploration Session: Discovering How You Value Present Experience
AFTERWORD
APPENDIX
THE DIAMOND BODY SERIES
ABOUT THE DIAMOND APPROACH
INDEX
E-MAIL SIGN-UP
Editor’s Preface
THE HIDDEN RICHNESS THAT rests in our life, in our heart, in our experience is here—not over there, in some better life, in some other house, in some other career, in some other relationship or country or spiritual school. One time, perhaps, we actually knew that—and then we forgot. From time to time, we are reminded by others of that richness, or we rediscover it ourselves. But over and over, we forget.
When we lose touch with the fullness of who we really are, when we ourselves cannot recognize or appreciate it, when it is invisible to us or seems inaccessible, the knowledge that we are the location and source of what we are seeking is only abstract information, irrelevant to our personal situation. It cannot affect who we are or how we live if we can’t find this richness in our immediate experience, can’t feel it or taste it or sense it directly. In fact, what we find is that most everything in our life works against our turning that knowledge into the currency of personal inner richness.
Our beliefs about what will allow us to survive, or what can help us solve our problems, or what will make us happy, or even what will fulfill our desire to make a difference in the world all seem to point us away from here. We are always going somewhere, internally or externally—to the store, the movies, the beach, the office, the restaurant, the television, the Internet, the newspaper, the latest spiritual teacher to come to t
own, our partners, our children, our friends, our parents, our worries, our concerns, our fears, our hopes. And on and on. We are in motion, going after, seeking out, restless, never satisfied, never at peace.
This seems to be the central dilemma of human life—that it is easier to desire what is over there than to appreciate what is right here. In fact, what is here seems to be so fundamentally inferior, less than, or inadequate compared to what is apparently over there, that it hardly seems worth the effort to look here. Why not just go over there?
Why, indeed? All spiritual paths, traditions, and schools have been attempting to answer that question for us for thousands of years. Each in their own way teaches that your spirit or your soul—your original unconditioned consciousness—exists only in you, so going elsewhere can never give you access to your essential nature, to who you really are. And the essence that is you is purported to be something quite magnificent: Your true spiritual nature is said to be full of love, peace, strength, beauty, joy, compassion, wisdom, and intelligence.
But even imagining yourself with this spiritual nature immediately conjures up the belief that you can only find these qualities somewhere else. After all, it is not what you experience in yourself now, right? You’re not there . . . yet. Spiritual paths and techniques thus become ways of getting there—to the place where you feel real, where you will become all these wonderful things. So you meditate, attempting to empty your mind or calm yourself or focus on an image or let go of all attachment. Or you chant and dance to invoke your spirit. Or you say prayers and go on vision quests. Yet all these techniques of finding your deeper self subtly imply that where you are now in yourself is not where you need to be.
You are seeking some ideal of the spiritual self and using these methods to attempt to reach that. The result is that the spiritual search can evoke the same dilemma that all other aspects of your life do. Since you cannot feel anything essential or profound in your present experience, you must travel away from here to find what you are looking for—even if it’s your own True Nature.
What if you found a spiritual method that focused completely on being right here? What if it did not require you to change yourself in any way in order to find yourself? What if you didn’t have to go away from yourself in order to go deeper? What if you could stop comparing yourself to something or someone that you imagine to be better or truer or more spiritual? What if transformation were a natural, spontaneous process that occurs only when you stop being so busy trying to change yourself?
The Unfolding Now is an introduction and invitation to just such a path. A. H. Almaas, the founder of the Diamond Approach® to inner realization, presents a progressive unfoldment of understanding what it means to “be where you are.”
Though being where you are may seem equivalent to stopping the search or seeing through the self or waking up to the oneness of reality, the path of the Diamond Approach is distinctly different from the Advaita paths of spiritual realization. These approaches invite one to directly see through the false identities of self in order to recognize and be the oneness of reality. Almaas’s approach is not a sudden awakening or a confrontational breakthrough but a gradual and gentle unfoldment of the realization of our True Nature. This subtle realization is not a single state but includes myriad possibilities—including the state of oneness.
In one sense, it is the simplest possible experience to be as you are in this moment without any inner movement away from yourself, without any judgment or reaction, without any explanation or justification, without any longing or seeking after something else. However, what Almaas does is reveal how multifaceted this simplicity of being actually is. We do not generally appreciate why the simple act of being is so difficult and why it challenges so much in our familiar sense of ourselves. In particular, it confronts the belief that becoming more real, more truly who we are, can only happen through our own intervention. But it is because of this very belief that we are always leaving ourselves. It is also why we believe that our spiritual development requires great effort and achievement.
This book offers a welcome alternative to all that struggle: a way to honor yourself where you are, how you are, and who you are, without judgment and without comparison to any standard.
To be where you are does not mean adopting a particular spiritual posture, such as clarity and equanimity, or an open-hearted stance of compassion and love. To be where you are means just that: to be where you are. Exactly where you are—warts and all, as the saying goes. But it also means becoming aware of where that is—aware in a way that is open, respectful, curious, and welcoming.
It is this process of opening to where you are that Almaas invites and encourages with great compassion and directness. He reveals many of the specific barriers to this allowing awareness and natural appreciation of wherever it is that we find ourselves. And he shows how, as the barriers are recognized, we can begin to see the ignorance implicit in them. This ignorance—that which we simply are not aware of—has set in place and maintained many of our beliefs about ourselves and reality. As that ignorance gives way to understanding, the barriers become less solid and fixed. Our knowing of where we are grows.
In this way, the teaching gently awakens in us the preciousness of what it means to leave ourselves alone, what it means to stop all of our subtle and constant inner activity of messing with ourselves. We can taste how deeply relaxed and at rest we feel when we don’t try to direct or manipulate our experience in any way. And we can also feel our resistance to that relaxation based on a deep fear of becoming passive, dependent, or helpless about our life.
Our relaxation into exactly who and where we are is what allows us to stop defending and hiding who we truly are. In the restfulness, we can simply be—be with awareness and awakeness and aliveness. This is something quite different from the passivity we feared. In simply being, we discover the implicit nature of Being, of our Being. We find that this Being is dynamic and intelligent. It becomes the agent of change—transforming our consciousness by revealing deeper and deeper truth. In this process, we begin to taste flavors and qualities of our True Nature, our essence.
This is the perennial wisdom: who we truly are is always right here, hidden within our experience, waiting to reveal itself. And this revelation is available and will happen if we are willing to open to what it truly means to be where we are. If we give ourselves the gift of not going anywhere, not trying to do anything, and not looking elsewhere, we step into the very real possibility of knowing the essence of who we are. This core principle underlies the practice of inquiry, the primary method of the Diamond Approach. The teaching presented in this book elucidates this principle and its profound relevance for living a satisfying human life.
The Unfolding Now is based on transcripts of a summer retreat given by Almaas for the members of his spiritual school. The presentation has been modified from its original format so that it communicates more clearly on the printed page, while retaining the experiential component of inquiries into the material that the students engaged in.
This component is in the form of exploration sessions at the end of each chapter. These reflections and questions provide guidance to help you absorb the subject matter in a more direct, personal way. We suggest that you enter into these exercises with as much curiosity, openness, and willingness as you can.
I leave you with an old Sufi story. It illuminates the basic misconception that creates the need for the inner journey Almaas describes in this book.
Someone saw Nasrudin searching for something on the ground.
“What have you lost, Mulla?” he asked.
“My key,” said the Mulla. So they both went down on their knees and looked for it.
After a time the other man said, “Where exactly did you drop it?”
“In my own house.”
“Then why are you looking here?”
“There is more light here than inside my own house.”
— IDRIES SHAH
The Exploits of
the Incomparable Mulla Nasrudin
The Unfolding Now invites us to bring light inside our own house so we can find what we have lost touch with in ourselves.
BYRON BROWN
Note to the Reader
THE UNFOLDING NOW is an introduction to a spiritual path that is based on being with your own immediate experience in an intimate and curious way. It is not about doing anything to your experience, but neither is it simply detaching from your experience. The spiritual practice that facilitates and supports being with your experience is what we call inquiry. Inquiry is based on an open and curious desire for knowing the truth of your experience exactly as it is. This truth is inherent in each moment of your experience and therefore a sincere interest in discovering it will invite that truth to reveal itself.
The way Almaas presents this teaching is itself an invitation to do inquiry. So feel free to stop at any time and explore within your own experience whatever he is describing. To help you focus your explorations, specific suggestions for inquiry are included in the text. At the end of each chapter, an Exploration Session will specify an area of inquiry related to the subject matter to guide your exploration and the development of your capacities for this practice. You are encouraged to do these inquiry exercises either alone through journaling or verbally with fellow explorers.
If you choose the first approach—writing out your answers in a journal—it is good to allow between fifteen and thirty minutes for each exercise. This will provide time for the questions to sit a while, bringing up responses from deeper in your consciousness rather than simply what is most readily available. Don’t worry about writing style or grammar or spelling—what’s important is to allow all of your thoughts and feelings and awarenesses to flow out and be articulated. This will make room for insights and recognitions to emerge about what you have written and for your experience to continue to unfold.
If you choose to do the exercises with someone else, generally it is good to plan on an hour of time to explore together, but it could be less if need be. You can use the simple format of taking fifteen to twenty minutes each to do the exercise. While one person inquires, the other is a silent witness who is practicing being present to his or her own experience while listening in an open, curious way to the inquiry. This is a particular benefit of exploring with others: your own inquiry process will be deepened by witnessing another inquiring. It is also good to allow time to discuss together the inquiry process and what you have discovered by doing it.