by A H Almaas
Should you find yourself especially interested in the inquiry practice itself beyond the exercises presented in this book, you are encouraged to read Spacecruiser Inquiry: True Guidance for the Inner Journey by A. H. Almaas (2002).
Inquiry is a spiritual practice, and like any other, it develops over time. Reading and rereading this book as you follow the gradual unfolding of your inner life can support and enrich the depth and subtlety of your inner journey. Finding your own rhythm and pace of opening will thus allow inquiry to reveal the hidden richness of your Being.
Acknowledgments
THIS BOOK BEGAN AS A TEACHING retreat that I conducted during the summer of 2003 in Sacramento, California, for experienced students in the Ridhwan School. I intended it to be a simple and direct guidance on how to work on oneself, how to meditate, and how to explore one’s reality and the reality of the world. By the end of the retreat, many students had expressed their wish that this teaching be put in written form. Many thought it could be a readable, approachable book for a larger audience beyond members of the School, even though it deals with profound matters.
I liked the idea, saw the point they were making, and discussed it with Byron Brown, my chief editor. He agreed that it would be a valuable support for traversing the inner spiritual path and one that could speak to people who are not familiar with the teaching of the Diamond Approach. He asked Elianne Obadia, whom he had supervised on other projects, to do the primary editing and worked with her to turn the transcripts of the talks and meetings into chapters with practice exercises. Elianne, with Byron’s guidance, did a wonderful job in transforming my talks into good, readable prose. And Damaris Moore provided timely support through her meticulous proofreading of the completed text.
This book did not come into its final form without the kind and supportive guidance and feedback of Shambhala’s able editors: first and foremost, Kendra Crossen Burroughs, who was a strong proponent of its value for spiritual seekers, and later, Liz Shaw, who nursed it through to completion. I am indebted to both my editors and Shambhala for making it possible for The Unfolding Now to find its way to you.
CHAPTER 1
Loving the Real
WITHOUT HEART, WE ARE not really human. And the possibility of having an authentic and deeply satisfying human life is only a pipe dream when our love is not directed to what truly fulfills the heart. To find true fulfillment, many of us at some point in life turn to the spiritual search. But what is it in spirituality that gives this fulfillment? Where does this deep satisfaction come from?
To answer this question, we need to find out why we become involved in the spiritual search in the first place. What are we looking for when we begin the journey? To experience new and remarkable states of consciousness? To travel to extraordinary realms beyond our everyday world? To be liberated from the difficulties and constraints of the world? Or are we looking to enrich and deepen the meaning of the lives we are living here on Earth? If our aim is to engage in our spiritual work so that it can impact and transform the way we live, we have to begin by seeing what we are actually doing in our lives. What are we up to? What do we really want?
We live in a big, noisy, distracting world. And when we look deeply into our hearts most of us find that one of the primary things we want is something quite simple: We want peace. We want rest, ease, and quiet. We want to stop our constant doing. We want space from all the struggle, conflict, desire, fear, and hatred. We are drawn to people who are peaceful, to situations where we can have peace and quiet. Simplicity without stress. Being at ease. In some very deep sense, this desire leads to greater fulfillment than our urges for pleasure, happiness, and freedom, for without this ease of simply being, none of the other things we pursue will truly satisfy us.
Most of us tend to look for quiet by changing our physical surroundings. We look outside of ourselves for this peace and ease of being. But much of the constant activity is actually inside our head. Even if we go away from the highways, from the supermarkets, from the TVs and telephones to sit and meditate—even in the quiet of our own room—it doesn’t mean that we are getting away from the noise inside. And why is there so much noise, so much activity? The answer, of course, comes to us as more noise—more activity in our mind. To explain, analyze, work with, or discuss why our minds are so busy can only increase the busyness inside. You have probably already noticed that yourself.
So our mind tends to be noisy and busy, just like the world we live in. We are hearing so much noise, that after a while we don’t know what we are doing here. There isn’t enough quiet space to feel ourselves in a simple, immediate way; we don’t have enough space to just be ourselves. All this extra stuff is competing for our attention. And if we do make the space to feel ourselves, what we find inside is mostly busyness, so the possibility of peace seems like a pipe dream. That is how our world is, how our life is, and how our mind is, too. Most of the time, we don’t even question it; we think that is just how it is. It is a noisy world, so we learn to live with it.
No wonder that for some people, getting ready to leave this world is what it takes to quiet down. If the dying process is slow, by the time they finally leave, it has usually quieted down inside. You might have seen this in someone you know. Often it requires something that radical for us to be quiet, something like death. In this book, we want to learn how to let death quiet us while we live—how to be quiet in the midst of the noise before we reach the end of life.
So much is going on in the world and in our minds that it reminds me of being in a movie theater nowadays. You go there to relax and enjoy a film, and more often than not, you are assaulted by loud noises. You can’t even feel anything about what you are watching because of all the clanging and explosions, all the yelling and screaming, all the loud action and intense suspense. It is like entering a war zone. Everything is turned up to the maximum.
Living in our minds is actually like that. Have you noticed how busy your mind is just reading these words? The mind is always occupied with reactions, judgments, questions, associations, desires, and attitudes. And we have become like teenagers who are used to all that noise. We think the noise is what reality is and no longer recognize what is truly real. We are not feeling ourselves in that intimate, simple, relaxed way that we like but may have forgotten exists—the feeling we would like to have when we go to a movie to relax and watch something interesting.
In contrast to our modern multiplex cinemas with their Hollywood blockbusters, what many of us would love is to go to an old-time movie theater where the sound is rather tame and quiet and the story evolves slowly, so we can actually follow what we feel about it. And we would love to be able to do the same thing with ourselves in our own experience, to be with ourselves in such a way that we can see where we are, notice what is happening, and know how we feel about it. This would let us feel more real.
What we miss when we don’t feel that kind of simple quiet is an awareness of ourselves in our experience in its immediacy, in its fullness. Instead, we are hearing echoes, reverberations, and reflections. All of our ideals, our ideas, our projects, our worries, and our fears become noise that overwhelms our immediate experience and the subtle sense of what we are. The preciousness of just simply being here in the moment is forgotten, lost in the shuffle, lost in the noise.
The spiritual journey is not about having experiences, interesting insights, or unusual perceptions, although those will often arise as part of it. I am not saying they don’t have their place and value, but they are not the point of the inner journey. Inner practice is basically a matter of settling and quieting. It is about settling into the simplicity of just being ourselves and feeling our realness—being in reality instead of in the echoes of reality.
THE NATURE OF BEING REAL
Reality is not what is usually reflected in our minds. Reality is so much cleaner and simpler, and in comparison to the noisy world of our usual inner experience, so much more settled and at ease. There is an exquisite intimacy in
us just feeling ourselves, being ourselves. And when we are quiet and settled like that, we simply feel real. We recognize the realness of our Being, the realness of our awareness.
Being real happens when the noise has subsided and the complexities dissolve and we are experiencing ourselves just as we are in our true condition. Not the reflection, not the picture, not the echo, not the memory, not the thought, not the reaction, but the thing itself. Usually, we assume that reality is full of all kinds of sounds and noise, and we believe most of what we hear. We focus on what the noise is saying or else we are busy responding to it—defending, justifying, reacting, explaining, judging, thinking, planning, remembering. But those activities are just the reflections of what is real.
Being real is what we are, what we truly are, and we experience it in the moment. And being real doesn’t require that we experience anything in particular. It is more about the way we are being, rather than what we are being. It is like the difference between hearing one thousand loud noises and hearing one single note, simple and gentle, which makes us feel closer to who and what we are. Closer to our heart. At that moment, we feel that our heart is alive and tender. Our heart has its tenderness when we are feeling ourselves. We recognize ourselves in that tenderness, in that nearness to what is real.
When we have lived through years of noise and drama, pushes and pulls, manipulation and struggle, and maybe after many years of spiritual practice or work, it is possible to recognize that what is needed is to simply be real. We want to be what is real in us, to remember or recognize the realness of what it is to be a human being—an aware, awake being—and then experience this beingness consciously. In other words, what we are is about reality, about being real—not about getting anywhere in particular but simply to be as we are. We want to learn how we can be here in as real a way as possible: How can I be completely here and completely myself, or as completely as possible? How can my atoms, which are scattered, vibrating, and oscillating in some kind of frenzy, slow down, collect, and settle here as what I am?
THE DESIRE FOR BEING REAL
As we go along, you will see that we can learn to be real, to connect with and become aware of our realness. And you will notice that something about this attracts us. We are attracted to the condition of being real. We like being real. And this is because we know the difference between being real and so much of what our usual experience is. Most of these things are not what is real; they are just reflections and distortions.
Many people get caught up in spiritual experiences and perceptions and all kinds of interesting, subtle impressions, some of which can be exciting and uplifting. But there is nothing like the simplicity of being oneself—settling into yourself, just being there, recognizing what you are, and feeling the sense of intimacy and realness of that. All of the inner journey, all of spiritual practice, ultimately comes down to this: that we are able to be genuinely what we are. If you want to do inner practice in order to develop certain powers or go to other dimensions or have special experiences, you still don’t know what spiritual work is. And this is because you are not yet recognizing what reality is or what being real means.
On the other hand, you already appreciate being real if you genuinely want to do inner work for its own sake. Being real means being the way you are when you are by yourself and quiet: “I know this is me and I know what that is like and I am comfortable being it. I have no conflict about it. And when I am interacting with someone, it is that reality of who I am that is interacting.” People don’t generally make the effort to do inner work if they don’t want to be real, if they don’t feel that being real is something good, something they want, something they appreciate. There is something precious about being real in an interaction, something that cannot be analyzed. Being real has nothing to do with getting something or giving something, being seen or making the other feel seen—none of that. It is just me, as what I am, actually being the one who is doing or saying something.
But it would be missing the point to want to be real so that we will feel satisfied or happy or accomplished. No, we want to be real because in fact we love being real. We love reality and we love to feel it, to see it, and to be it as much as possible. Only when we can slow down and rest in the simple, precious moments of living, can we recognize that we love this quality of realness for its own sake and not because of what it does for us.
We don’t love it because it makes us feel good or is good for us, or because it means an attainment of one kind or another, or because it represents some kind of enlightenment or advancement. We love it because we know that when we are real, we are home—no matter the sensation or the flavor. Sometimes being real means allowing pain or accepting a painful truth. Yet something in us aligns with an inner ground of authenticity when we are real. We love it because of its inherent rightness in our soul, the sense of “Aha, here I am and there is nothing to do but be.”
THE LOVE OF BEING REAL
Wanting to be real indicates having a measure of self-love, some kind of love of what we are. So when we want to move toward being real, we are already expressing a lovingness and an appreciation that is essential to spiritual work. If that lovingness is not there, our practice is done for the wrong reason; it is part of the noise. What I’m pointing to is not a selfish kind of self-love; it is not possessiveness or self-centeredness. This heart attitude toward realness—this feeling that our consciousness, our soul, our awareness, has about being real—is very subtle and difficult to explain. To recognize this appreciation for the real in ourselves indicates that we have already developed a certain level of maturity and a specific guidance for our practice.
It is a precious moment when we recognize this love, this appreciation—when we know that we are not practicing to accomplish something. I am not meditating, praying, chanting, or working on myself to make myself better. I am not doing this work so that I will be as good as the next person or because I have an idea or some ideal I developed or heard about and decided was a good thing to go after. It is not a matter of going after anything. It is just a matter of settling down with myself.
It means learning how to recognize our agitated activity, our noise, and how not to go along with it. Instead we learn to simply settle, relax, and be. And I don’t mean that when you relax and be, you just sit and meditate. Meditation is something we practice, but ultimately, engaging inner practice and living life are not two things. Being real, learning to be real, is our practice in every moment; it becomes the living of our real life. And being real transcends any dimension, any experience, any perception—regardless of the content. It is just the experience of feeling no distance from yourself—no dissociation, no scattering, no dispersion, no distraction. And the more you recognize this collectedness, this presence, this hereness, this settledness, the more you have a sense of being real, of reality.
So at some point, we see that spiritual practice is a matter of learning reality, learning to recognize realness, learning to be real, and learning to be ourselves in our realness. And we see that we are only interested in learning these things if we have the appreciation and love of being real. We have to love being genuine to go through the trouble and the discipline of inner work. It is because we are being authentic, because we are approaching reality, because we are being touched by reality, that we love it and are willing to go through the various processes of acknowledging and seeing the truth—whether painful or scary or pleasurable.
Our first step is to recognize the love and appreciation in us that draws us to reality. Regardless of what motivation we start with for doing inner work, our love of reality at some point reveals itself if we are sincere. We recognize that we just like being near reality, we love being comfortable with it and having no conflicts about it, and we like being as intimate with it as possible. We want to become so intimate that we simply are what is real . . . and that is what we love.
EXPLORATION SESSION
Your Relationship to Being Real
This explo
ration will help you clarify your own relationship to reality and realness and how it affects your life and your spiritual journey.
When have you felt most real in your life and how did you recognize it? Think of a situation in which you felt you were truly being yourself, perhaps when it was a real challenge to do so. What responses did you notice in your mind? In your heart? In your body? Contrast this with another incident when you felt distant from your own realness or authenticity. What did you experience then?
Do you believe it is a good or moral thing to be real? Is being real part of your spiritual ideal? Does the desire to be real play a part in your interest in this book?
Is realness something you want more of in your life? If so, why? What would you give up in order to be more real? Do you feel compelled toward being authentically yourself? Do you love it? If so, has the love of realness motivated your choices or led you to practice in certain ways in your life?
CHAPTER 2
Learning to Be Real
LEARNING TO BE REAL IS a full-time job. It doesn’t work to just practice it at certain times. But to make that kind of commitment, you have to love and appreciate reality. You have to want to be real at any cost. You have to love being real—even if you don’t like what you’re feeling or who you think you are in any particular moment. That kind of love is the most powerful motive—the real inspiration—for our inner work. If your longing for reality is lukewarm or if it comes and goes, where will the passion and inner support come from to sustain yourself as you learn to be real? The more you are in touch with your love of being real, the more you will be inspired . . . and the more you will be fired up to do the work.