The One You Feed - A.H. Almaas

Episode Date: June 29, 2016

This week we talk to A.H. Almaas about spiritual awakening A. H. Almaas is the pen name of A. Hameed Ali, creator of the Diamond Approach to Self-Realization. The Diamond Approach is a contemporary teaching that developed within the context of both ancient spiritual teachings and modern depth psychology theories. Almaas has authored seventeen books about spiritual realization, including the Diamond Heart series, The Pearl Beyond Price, The Void, The Unfolding Now, and The Point of Existence. He founded the Ridhwan School, an inner work school devoted to the realization of True Nature. The orientation of the school is directed toward helping students become aware of and embody their “essence” or essential nature. His latest book is Runaway Realization: Living a Life of Ceaseless Discovery. In This Interview, A.H. Almaas and I Discuss... The One You Feed parable The different layers of consciousness The angelic and animal nature How the animal side is focused on our survival- the drive to survive Being is our fundamental essence Self Realization- when our Being and our identity becomes the same thing The primary method of The Diamond Approach- direct experience of being The process of inquiry Engaging in some practice that questions what we assume to know about ourselves How taking things at face value shortchanges ourselves of deeper knowledge How the separate sense of self is not an illusion, but it is only one of the ways to view reality For more show notes visit our website     A grandfather is talking with his grandson and he says there are two wolves inside of us which are always at war with each other.  One of them is a good wolf which represents things like kindness, bravery and love. The other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed, hatred and fear. The grandson stops and thinks about it for a second then he looks up at his grandfather and says, “Grandfather, which one wins?” The grandfather quietly replies, the one you feed The Tale of Two Wolves is often attributed to the Cherokee indians but there seems to be no real proof of this. It has also been attributed to evangelical preacher Billy Graham and Irish Playwright George Bernard Shaw. It appears no one knows for sure but this does not diminish the power of the parable. This parable goes by many names including: The Tale of Two Wolves The Parable of the Two Wolves Two Wolves Which Wolf Do You Feed Which Wolf are You Feeding Which Wolf Will You Feed It also often features different animals, mainly two dogs.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

So the most important thing is to be interested in the truth of reality, but not by thinking about it or reading about it, but experiencing it. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter.

It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, And does your dog truly love you?

We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us.

Our guest on this episode is A.H. Almas, which is the pen name of A. Hamid Ali, creator of the Diamond Approach to Self-Realization. The Diamond Approach is a contemporary teaching that developed within the context of both ancient spiritual teachings and modern-depth psychology theories. Almas has authored 17 books about spiritual realization, including Diamond Heart Series, The Pearl Beyond Price, The Void, The Unfolding Now, and The Point of Existence. His latest book is Runaway Realization, Living a Life of Ceaseless Discovery. Here's the interview. Hi, Amid. Welcome to the show. Hi, Eric. I'm excited to get you on.

You are one of the founders of something known as the Diamond Approach that I've heard a lot of wonderful things about. And as I got into reading a variety of your work, I became very interested in a lot of the things that you're saying. So we're going to explore the Diamond Approach in some of your later books also. But let's start like we always do with the parable. There's a grandmother who's talking with her granddaughter and she says, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the granddaughter thinks about it for a second and she looks up at her grandmother and she says, well grandma, which one wins? And the granddaughter thinks about it for a second, and she looks up at her grandmother, and she says, Well, Grandma, which one wins?

And the grandmother says, The one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Yeah, so that's a nice parable, and I'd like to address it from two levels, actually. The first level is the feeding the one who wins is the one you feed it is a principle actually of consciousness just like there are laws of nature like in physics and biology whatever conscious mind has its own laws and principles and one of those laws and principles is the fact is whatever you pay attention to tends to grow to become more there and tend to develop if you ignore it don't pay attention to it it tend to not grow to stay stunted in its growth. And now we come to the second level, which is what are the two worlds in a human being?

The way I look at it is that the human being has a consciousness, which some people call a soul or spirit or whatever, or mind. But it is like we have an individual consciousness that expresses who we are that holds our experience, and through which we know ourself and respond to our environment. This consciousness has many properties and has many faculties and capacities and has many layers in it and many parts. It is, first of all, the mainspring of life. It is the life force. It functions as the life force in our physical life. And the life force has two parts to it you can say two parts that i refer to as the angelic part and the animal parts the angelic part is what most teaching think of as spirit or spiritual

like love humility compassion tenderness, openness, truth, sincerity, awareness, emptiness, expansion, awakening. All of that has to do with what I call the angelic side or part of the depth of our consciousness. The other part that we are all born with all human being are born with is what i call the animal side the animal side is like an animal invested in surviving surviving getting its need met you're one of the founders of the diamond approach and at one point you say something to the effect that the goal of the Diamond Approach is the full development and realization of Being, and that Being is with a capital B, expressing itself in and through an individual human life. Can you help us understand what this Being is and what that full fruition looks like? Well, being, I mean the spiritual nature. Our spiritual nature is our being, which means what is our true existence, what we are fundamentally at the depth.

When we know ourself, when we go into our subjectivity and find out who it is, what we are, we recognize that what we are is not separate from the fact that we are that we are our being is what we are our being and our identity become the same thing and that's what i call self-realization or learning or about our being so here a spirit is recognized as the being of our consciousness, the true existence. It's what makes us be.

So it's not just a beautiful, nice thing to have. It is fundamental. It is what we are. Yeah, it is what we are at the most fundamental level. And it's said that the primary method of the diamond approach is exploring and understanding immediate experience. What do you mean by that? Meaning that the method of the Diamond Approach is not a matter of doing a prayer or a chant or a concentration on an object or trying to get to a certain state.

It means we take our experience as it is now meaning what we feel what we sense in our body in our mind the context of our situation so when i said uh inquiry into experience our experience includes the totality of what we are aware of and our perception and our inner experience all of it so it's it's inquiring it to find out first of all what it is because we're not always aware of everything that's happening in us or within us so we become aware of it and the next thing after becoming aware of it is to find out what is it what's it about how come it is that way? Which means to understand it. So immediate experience means what is really happening now. It's not thinking about it. It's feeling it.

It is sensing it and being curious about it. What is the approach towards inquiry? Is that usually done? Is there a series of questions that are asked? Or help me understand a little bit more about how you steer yourself through that in a type of inquiry that is useful versus possibly just ruminating on certain things. Yeah, like in our class, we could do it in a formal way when a person is asked questions but they're not asked sometimes you ask some specific question if we're teaching something in particular like teaching about love we ask questions like what stops you from feeling love what way have you

experienced love so for me it is an organic thing it's always i'm having experience i'm always curious about what it is what's it about and as i'm curious about what it is, what's it about. And as I'm curious about it, it opens up, it unfolds and reveals more meaning, more shades of meaning, which reveal deeper dimensions of experience. One of the things you say that is in order to contact the deeper truth of who we are, and I think this is getting back to that inquiry, we must engage in some activity or practice that questions what we assume to be true about ourselves. If somebody, for instance, feels, I don't like this person, you feel just, that's it, I don't like this person. That's the truth. Well, the fact is more than that.

When you explore, how come you don't like this person? You might find out that this person remind you of something in the past that hurt you for instance and you you and earth hurt that you didn't know about and then what might be a whole complex like a trauma or something like that by us taking our experience at face value is short-changing ourself because our experience at face value is shortchanging ourselves because our experience expresses really always the totality of our being, but we don't see it all. We only see the surface manifestation of it. And is that the goal of working with groups and teachers is to

help you, lead you through that inquiry in a way that's different than what you obviously know how to do, because it's very difficult, my experience is, to see the assumptions we're making about ourselves. They're embedded. Yeah, so in our work, in our groups, we teach meditation of different kind, different kind of practices, to develop capacities, being able to feel yourself. Many people can't feel their emotions. Or when they feel their emotion, they act them out right away.

So a person needs the skill of feeling their emotion without acting them out. Some people don't feel their body. They don't sense their legs or their belly or some part of them. or their belly or some part of them. And they need to learn to... We have methods of how people can learn to feel their body, the totality of their body, so the whole body becomes alive and sensitive. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden.

And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you, and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth.

Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stunt man reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all.

Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead.

It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I get hung up a lot on, you know, studied a lot of different philosophies, and it's often said that this sense of a separate self is a delusion. And what you say is that it's not, our separate self is not a delusion, but it's one of the ways that reality appears. Our problem comes when we think it's the only way. Yeah, so you're getting that from my last book, Runaway Realization, when I go further than the usual traditional teaching, which is that the self is a delusion and the dualistic point of view is not real. We are all unity, one being and all that.

All that's true. But, you know, there are further stages that we have in our teaching. We recognize that the way of experience in the ordinary way of experiencing thing where we are separate and and have an ego and we have our needs and we treat everybody as another object that is just simply one way that reality manifests itself i mean 99.9 percent of the human race are living that world that way right so when people say it's all delusion it seems a little bit you know too much too much of presumption because there must be a reason why everybody's experiencing that way and so what i learned that there are

many ways of experiencing reality one of them is the ordinary way of ego so ego just one way that true being manifests itself another way it manifests itself as light and love and all that and there are other ways also of true nature or being, true being manifesting itself. So that way we take the ego not as a delusion, but as one way of experiencing reality. Another way of looking at it is that it is a way of experiencing ourself that got arrested in its development

because it's a certain stage of development. Everybody goes through, regardless how lighted they become, they have to go through the stage of being an ego. So it's a stage that many people get arrested at that stage. And you can work on it so that to go to the next stage, instead of rejecting it as an error, as a mistake. It sounds like when we say that that ordinary viewpoint, that idea of a separate self is a complete delusion, that's a hard place to start from, because it seems so real,

whereas it's a lot easier to accept okay that's one way to see the world and that's the way that by default i'm seeing the world but there are lots of other ways to do it and it that just seems to be an easier stepping off place for me yeah and i think it's better to take it not as a delusion but as just a way of experiencing it and not to get hung up on it that's all yeah this is is again about, you know, who do you feed? If you feed that way of experiencing things, that's what becomes your reality. If you are open to other ways of experiencing things, the spiritual ways, and paying more attention to them, that way can begin to grow. And we have the option now to experience other ways of being.

What is essence? You talk about essence, and again, this is with a capital E. can begin to grow. And we have the option now to experience other ways of being. What is essence? You talk about essence, and again, this is with a capital E, that our essence is what is really important. So what is that? I used the word essence some years ago more than I use it now. But basically, what I meant by essence is the essence of our consciousness, the essence of our soul, the essence of our consciousness the essence of our soul essence of what we are and what we discover that essence is nothing but

being so being an essence are the same thing as does mean just what is what is your essence what is your essential nature in that way essence is used and when you discover what your essence is, you recognize it as a kind of presence, that self-aware presence that has its own inherent awareness and inherent lovingness. So if being is expressing itself through us, and we have these essences, is my essence different than yours and i know that you're probably going to answer that on multiple different levels well essence is is is basically saying that each each of us individually we have an essence and our essence turns out to be the spiritual nature. So, our essence turns out to

be the true being or the true spirit, which is the nature and essence of everybody and everything. So, we don't have separate essences. It manifests through us in different ways, but it is the same spirit. There's discussion that most of our suffering is due to being alienated from ourselves, that a lot of the dissatisfaction comes, say, not from what we think it is, like our sickness or our material problems or other things, but from not being ourselves. Well, I mean, that is true to a large extent you know Buddhism emphasizes that that life is suffering

and in some sense life is suffering in the sense it has lots of suffering in it I mean there's physical suffering killing in places rape and all this thing around the world which is suffering that is not

related to the fact that we that we are trapped in our ego. However, at the same time, that being trapped in our ego causes, if we just hold on to the ego perspective, there is a lot of suffering. Because in the ego perspective, the animal nature is more dominant, and that one tends to be dissatisfied and tends to keep grudges, it tends to carry the past with it, to carry what happened in the past to the present, so there's a reputation of especially negative things. So that is really what is meant by it that we that our identification

of the world of ego the world of the self if we take that to be the only reality then our life will be full of suffering and also the suffering that happens around the world the killing and plunder and all that it's also because those people, those killers those terrorists or whatever criminals they're trapped in the same things, they do these things because their bad wolf

is in control, so yes there is suffering and you can trace most of it to the ego identification. But I wouldn't say that somebody has cancer or has diabetes or has Parkinson's. It's because of the self or the ego. The body has its own genetics. Makeup and the suffering that happens there too.

body has its own genetics makeup and there's suffering that happens there too independent whether we are you know spiritually illuminated people or not I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk

gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us tonight.

How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening?

Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It sounds like the diamond approach, you're bringing together some meditative practices you're bringing together psychological inquiry are there other key parts of it yeah i bring in a different meditation

and inquiry the inquiry is both psychological and spiritual and philosophical and also there's a philosophical side which is asking fundamental philosophical questions, but answering them with experience. The philosophies ask all kinds of good questions, but they try to answer them with their mind. And this approach, we answer them by experiential inquiry. We can call it psychological, but it's not just psychological, because when you experience love, for instance, or when you experience compassion, that is not psychological.

That's spiritual. And we inquire into that. When I experience love, for instance, I inquire into it. What is that? It feels like a sweet atmosphere. It feels like it's sweet nectar. What is that? You see, I'm inquiring into something spiritual. And that's not psychological. It's beyond it's sweet nectar. What is that? You see, I'm inquiring into something spiritual,

and that's not psychological. It's beyond the psychological. So psychological is part of it, but it's also a spiritual inquiry. And we do include meditation that we borrowed from different traditions and meditation that we developed ourselves. We use chanting. We use actually music, concentration, contemplation of music as part of our practices. Is there anything that in this very short window of time,

like an inquiry, an example of an inquiry question that we could talk about that would give listeners just a taste of what that's like? Well, I think the important thing is for each one of us to realize there's much more to us than we tend to think. There is much more potential to a human being than we tend to know. If we are open to ourself, if we really turn toward our own subjectivity and examine it, inquire it, be interested in it, be vulnerable to it, let it come out. Treasures will come out, treasures that we haven't suspected of experiences, not just of love and compassion, but of depth and immensity. So the most important thing is to be interested in the truth of reality. To find out the truth of reality, but not by thinking about it or reading about it, but experiencing it.

Find out for oneself. What is the truth of what I am? What is the truth of the world? Excellent. what is the truth of what I am what is the truth of the world excellent well I will make sure to put links on the website to both the school and some of your key works

that you talk about and thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show Hamid I really appreciate it good luck and have a good time with your program okay thanks so much take care okay bye Take care. Okay. Bye. Bye. You can learn more about A.H. Almas and this podcast at one you feed dot net slash Almas.

That's A.L.M.A.A.S. Thank you.