The One You Feed - A.H. Almaas on Discovering our Essence

Episode Date: July 28, 2020

A. H. Almaas is the pen name of A. Hameed Ali. He is the founder of the Diamond Approach to Self-Realization which is a contemporary teaching that developed within the context of both ancient spiritual teachings and modern depth psychology theories. He has authored eighteen books about spiritual realization, including the Diamond Heart series, The Pearl Beyond Price, The Void, The Alchemy of Freedom, and his newest book, Love Unveiled: Discovering the Essence of the Awakened Heart.In this episode, A.H. Almaas and Eric explore how to use curiosity, inquiry, courage, kindness, and love to discover our true nature, which he refers to as our “essence”. It is a deep and freeing approach to achieve healing and wholeness within ourselves. But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!In This Interview, A.H. Almaas and I Discuss Discovering our Essence and…His newest book, Love Unveiled: Discovering the Essence of the Awakened HeartThe Diamond ApproachWhat he means when he talks about our “essence”The difference between personality and essenceSeeing our children’s essential nature and loving them for itThe Theory of HolesThe role of inquiry in feeling your emotionAccessing your emotions by seeing what’s in the way of feeling themPrinciples that ground us in inquiry so we might see the totality of our experience in the present momentThe difference between and integration of psychology and spiritualityThe result of staying with our direct, immediate experienceHow wanting to change ourselves interferes with our ability to study and learn about ourselvesIncluding our desires in our inquiryThat “allowing things to be exactly as they are” is the highest teaching there isBecoming consistently curious about what’s happeningHow to learn to stay with emotional painThe similarities between sadness and kindnessInquiring about our essence A.H. Almaas Links:diamondapproach.comTwitterInstagramFacebookBLUblox offers high-quality lenses that filter blue light, reduce glare, and combat the unhealthy effects of our digital life. Visit BLUblox.com to get free shipping and also 15% off with Promo Code: WOLFTalkspace: the online therapy company that lets you connect with a licensed therapist from anywhere at any time. Therapy on demand. Non-judgemental, practical help when you need it at a fraction of the cost of traditional therapy. Visit www.talkspace.com and enter Promo Code: WOLF to get $100 off your first month.SimpliSafe: Get comprehensive protection for your entire home with security cameras, alarms, sensors as well as fire, water, and carbon monoxide alerts. Visit simplisafe.com/wolf for free shipping and a 60-day money-back guarantee.  If you enjoyed this conversation with A.H. Almaas on Discovering Our Essence, you might also enjoy these other episodes:A.H. Almaas (2016)James FinleyHenry ShukmanSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We all have emotions. Whether we can access them or not is another story. So, the beginning of the path is learning to access our emotion by seeing what's in the way of them. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes 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 No 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 really no really.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. that developed within the context of both ancient spiritual teachings and modern psychology theories. He has authored 18 books about spiritual realization, including the Diamond Heart series, the Pearl Beyond Price, The Void, The New Love Unveiled, and many others. Hello, Hamid. Welcome to the show. Good to talk to you again, Eric. Yes, it's a pleasure to have you on for the second time. Yes, it's a pleasure to have you on for the second time. We will get into your work here shortly, but let's start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there is a grandfather who's talking 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 grandson stops, and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather, and he says, Well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather 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. It reminds me of a similar story that one of the teachers I knew used to use, which is the story of the two heaps. And the story is that everybody who comes into the path, he has two heaps in them. One big one, one small one. The big heap is mostly of negative emotions and tendencies and difficulties. The small heap of positive one. And by engaging the path and

practice in a small heap, the heap's growing, growing, growing, until at some point, the big heap becomes a small heap and the small heap becomes the big heap. It reminds me of that, a similar thing. Yeah, that's a good approximation, and I like that idea because it's not necessarily that either heap goes away completely, right? It's just that the balance is shifting. So let's talk about your work. Your work is known as the Diamond Approach. And in order for us to talk about the diamond approach at all in any useful way, we need to use the word essence. And so tell me what you mean by the word essence.

So essence is like the essence of what we are, meaning the true nature of the human being, which ultimately means the true nature of our consciousness. We are a conscious being and consciousness pervades our body and our mind. And when you realize what is the true nature, what is the essence of this true nature, that's what I call essence. And it is usual when you experience it, it is a luminous light and presence. It's both a goodness and a truth at the same time. And we find that to be what we truly are at the deepest level. So it is the very nature of the good wolf. You say that essence is forgotten and that

instead of essence, we now have personality, that essence is replaced and that instead of essence we now have personality. That essence is replaced with various identifications. Talk a little bit more about the difference between, say, personality or identifications and essence. Well, what most people

know as themselves is what I call personality. Because the way human beings develop seems almost everybody maybe except jesus christ if we if we take the story that when we're born we are essential our essential nature is still present with us but with it there are animal tendencies and desires and all that but we still have our pure nature and innocence and through encounters of life interaction with parents that nature becomes eclipsed it becomes covered over by tendencies and impressions of oneself and beliefs and basically experience impresses our consciousness and leaves impression and those

impressions in time become organized into a sense of self that we know ourselves to be and that's why sometimes called the personality so the personality or the sense of self or what i call the ego self is really a is it is still our usual consciousness whose essence is the spiritual essence but it becomes impressed and conditioned and formed by various experiences all the way to the exclusion of our original essence. So some few people grow up with some contact with the inner goodness and innocence and that's purity. They have the tendencies and all that but the actual presence of itself most people not touch with it because that's the spiritual essence and that's why people engage in spiritual

work to reconnect or discover this spiritual essence, which when we discover it is not just what we are. It's not only goodness, but it is also freedom. Let's talk about what is personality and what's not. Because one of the things that's interesting if you look at a little child is you notice right away that children have preferences of some sort. They're not a complete blank slate. Yeah, they have preferences, they have qualities, and the differences in the qualities,

each baby is unique in terms of both the qualities, pure good qualities, and also desires, reaction, all of those. Yeah, the child has a mixture. In some sense, the child is born with the two wolves, you could say. We're born with our essential neighbors. We're also born with instinctual drive, instinctual forces for survival, propagation, all of that. And those are on the animal level. They are primitive, and they just want to live and survive.

And sometimes, irrespective of our good nature, so it becomes self-centered. And so even the child can be self-centered. Right. Babies seem to be very much so. What sort of way might you raise a child that you would preserve as much of its essence as possible? First of all, you cannot raise a child who will for sure be in touch with their essence consciously. It's just like part of our nature, human being, that we develop an ego or what I call the ego self. But you can help the child be closer to their essential nature or essential nature more easily accessible by the way you raise them, partly through love. Through love, when you really love your child for who and what they are, not because they're your child, but because of their innate qualities, you see your essential nature and you love them for it. So that love and that care and giving them the protection and the care and also recognition of what they are, their unique qualities, and supporting that for it to mature and develop,

they will still have reaction and all of that, and we don't want to reject them, but have an accepting attitude that also guides them that, well, it's okay, you're mad now, but there are other ways you could get what you want. Yelling and screaming doesn't do it. So it's a skill, really, to be a good parent. Most parents have some of that skill,

but not to the extent where the child can develop with some kind of openness to their essential nature. Because most people most parents don't have their own connection with essential nature they don't know what it is. It needs somebody who's already awakened to this and they're mature in it filled with it so and both parents have to be there or three pairs whatever the situation is, to actually raise a child like that. And still that will not make them completely pure. We just give them more than most people, than the average person,

more openness and capacity to connect to that inner nature that really all human beings at some point are looking for because it is them and they've lost contact with it. So of course they're going to look for it. And they tend to look for it outside and to think that will make them happy, whatever. But what will make them happy is really the happiness that is in their heart. And that's the movement inward that at some point happens for many people. So let's talk about what is the theory of wholes. Yeah, so the theory of wholes I developed at the beginning of my work

as a new contribution to spiritual understanding and spiritual practice, which is that as a person developed from childhood, they are first open to their essential nature, and the essential nature has many qualities, as you said, love, compassion, strength, true will, peacefulness, gratitude, stillness, all of these qualities that are part of essential nature is not one monolithic, uniform medium. It is a medium, but it can manifest itself as a different quality. Sometimes the child is innocent. Sometimes the child is assertive and strong, sometimes the child is quiet and serene.

All these are qualities that we originally have that's part for our essential nature, I call them essential aspects, the aspects of essence. So depending on what happened we lose contact with each one of them in a different way than we do that depending on our situation. Like certain interactions, certain events that happen in our early few years will disconnect us from one particular quality. As we become disconnected from one particular quality, we develop something instead of it, which is part of our personality. As we go through that part of our personality and sort of deconstruct it and see through

it, we will encounter the emptiness, which is the disconnection of the quality. And that emptiness will feel like a hole in our consciousness, a hole in our soul, that something is missing. So that's where the theory of holes comes, that we all have many holes when we begin our spiritual search, but we're not aware of the hole, we're just not in touch with many of these qualities. So as we study and explore and deconstruct our personality, part by part, because I don't do it all at once, which many teachings do.

You just get rid of the self, and that way you become awakened. Well, that's one way of doing it. It works. But the one way I found in this teaching, which has very handy, very useful for many people, you could deal with one segment of your personality, like your self-esteem, difficult self-esteem or a feeling of losing your sense of well or any of those things. By working with them and understanding them and seeing what is their history, what are their

beliefs around them, that opens up to some kind of emptiness which we go through, we will begin to reconnect with that quality that we have lost at some point. And usually we see a history, a particular history that we've gone through. The person, part of our personal history, it's either encounter with our parents, accident, illnesses, diseases, things that happen in school, many things. But, you know, there's a lot of fears, a lot of pain that arises,

a lot of reaction, beliefs, and all that. It's a constellation around each of the qualities, which when made transparent, it opens up to some kind of emptiness that I call a hole. But that will become the entry, the portal to that particular quality of our essential nature and then we begin to experience it. Like if we disconnected from our love we feel unloved, unlovable and we deal with the sense of being unlovable or experience it and not fight it and not to try to prove to

ourselves we are lovable or unlovable just feel the feeling of being unlovable and you realize that in our heart there is an emptiness there's a hole and i feel unlovable there's no love there and when you feel that you might feel what is it happened My father didn't love me, or I just believe they wasn't loved because they love somebody else more than me. There is a hurt or a wound that arises that opens to an emptiness. Then the love arises. The heart becomes full of love, like sweetness and love and goodness, and a sense of feeling both loving others and loving oneself,

and also feeling that love is part of me, part of my heart, part of my essential nature. So what we're saying here is that as essence disappears, then it leaves a hole. And most of us see that hole as a deficiency of some sort, but by looking deeper in that way, is a path back to essence. Exactly. A deficiency is actually the path to essence because it is the disconnection from essence. It's confronting the disconnection. Because for a lot of people, there is a sense of, okay, I'm feeling an emotion. It's pretty popular in spiritual circles these days to say, feel the emotion. Don't go up into all your stories, but stop and feel the emotion. But for a lot of people, they don't really know how to do that.

So this is, I think, would fall under a pretty big category in the Diamond approach, which was inquiry. But what are some ways to inquire into emotional states that are actually useful? Well, first of all, that's true. Many people might not even be able to feel their emotions. First, we need to be able to have access to our emotions. We all have emotions. Whether we can access them or not is another story. So the beginning of the path is learning to access our emotions by

seeing what's in the way of them. The beliefs or fears or whatever it is. And we use breathing techniques and as you said, inquiry, which is inquiring to your state. Whatever you're experiencing right now, what is it? What am I experiencing?

Am I feeling well? Don't feel anything. And what's that like to not feel anything? If somebody is just let themselves feel, I don't feel anything, there is some kind of a hardness in their heart or some kind of a gauzy kind of thing. And if they feel it, let it happen breathe into it it will disappear it will and then emotion will arise as fear or sadness or jealousy or any of those and then the point is not just to feel our emotion then we need to fulfill our emotion but our emotion is just part of our experience.

There is emotion, there are sensations, there are thoughts and images, there are memories that are connected with them. So when I say in our path to inquire, I mean to inquire into what is happening right now. Emotions are a very important part of it, but that does not mean I should forget about what I'm thinking. It does not mean I should forget about what gets associated with the emotion. All of it is the data that the inquiry uses. The inquiry basically means I have all these parts of my experience.

What are they all about? What is the meaning of all of them together? all about? What is the meaning of all of them together? And by asking the question, what are all they about? They begin to change and transform and become more focused until it becomes clear what is the meaning of what's going on. That then opens up to another level of emotion, another level of experience. And I inquire into that and it keeps happening even

if i get into my essential nature and i feel love or i feel a sense of presence of strength question continue what is that what's that feel like what does it sense like does it have a texture does it smell like something does it make me feel one way or another? Inquiry opens the doors of the consciousness to greater and greater discovery of what and who we are, Thank you. 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. Brian 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 ReallyNoally.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.

Now, for a lot of people, myself included, certainly at points, right? Inquiry stays in the realm of mental. It's just thoughts. What you're saying is to inquire into the totality of our experience, thoughts, emotions, sensations, sounds, smells, the whole, the whole kit and caboodle, right? And so I know that the diamond approach is not based on tips, right? So I'm not expecting you to summarize huge amounts of work that you've done in one little sentence, but any general ideas for principles that can ground us in inquiry? No, it's a good question. When I say inquiry, I don't mean mental inquiry. I mean inquiry into the totality of our experience. Not only that, the totality of my experience at the present moment.

So we start with the question of where am I now in the experiential universe? Suppose I check with myself or somebody check with themselves and experience some anxiety. And then the question is, what's the anxiety about? There might be thoughts with it, but what's the anxiety about? The person might not know. What's the anxiety about? It's something you feel, of course, in your psyche, in your heart. And if you ask, you might think, oh oh i have a date for the first time with this

person and i'm anxious about meeting her you wonder why am i anxious about that you see you ask about what is arising and you find out well the answer arises is because oh i'm afraid i won't know how to be myself, how to be real. Well, you ask yourself, what's the big deal about that? And then the answer arises from your heart, I like this person. I want to be real and true with them. That becomes what I mean by meaning. The meaning, if you realize, you're anxious because you really want to be truly yourself with this person you're going to meet who you really like very much.

So you start with anxiety, but you end up with feeling of liking and love and some kind of sincerity. But it is all staying with the now. And so in what ways does this differ from or in what ways is it similar to a lot of what somebody might be doing in psychology? I've heard you sort of say that the advent of psychology and everything we know about psychology is a great boom for spiritual seeking, but that oftentimes people separate the two and the diamond approach tries to integrate the two. Very true. There are similarities in psychology in the sense

we use some psychological understanding and knowledge that developed in the 20th century, 21st century. At the same time, it's different from psychology in the sense it's not a therapy, because I begin here with anxiety, and I'm not going into anxiety because I want to get rid of it, which is what therapy wants to do. I want to get rid of it, get over anxiety. Here I want to understand it. I want to know what's the anxiety about.

So I really want to know its truth. So the motivation is a little different than therapy. truth. So the motivation is a little different than therapy. And the result that arises is a feeling, not just a feeling of love, but the feeling of presence of love, which is a spiritual quality, which usually therapy doesn't get to. So both the orientation and what we get to is different from what psychotherapy, psychology does. Western psychology does not include things like our essential nature or essence. Right, and so is just by having a different orientation, is that enough to make what happens

and how it comes out different? A big part is orientation. The other part is the view of reality. The view that includes our essence, essential nature. Psychology doesn't, its view doesn't have that. You see, the view, I mean, the perspective you take about yourself. And of course, when you're working, a spiritual worker, frequently you have

a teacher and the teacher already have that view already has not only the view but the fruit the fruit of the view which is the essential nature itself so the intention the teacher is already

the person is coming from the presence of goodness or love or whatever. And so the inquiry is a guidance. But the orientation part of it, the views part of it, and it's difficult to really know how it's different until you actually do it. And you see in therapy, when you get to the emptiness, they think it's a bad thing, you want to get away do it. And you see, in therapy, when you get to the emptiness, they think it's a bad thing, you want to get away from it. For us, for me, when I get to the emptiness, I welcome it.

Oh, I'm getting someplace. You see, I'm getting to the entry door. It's not a problem, it is actually the beginning of the solution. Now, psychology doesn't have that perspective at all. Right, it's a very different orientation. the beginning of the solution. Now, psychology doesn't have that perspective at all. Right. It's a very different orientation. And so is doing inquiry something that we're really capable of doing by ourselves, or does it really take someone to help us inquire and guide the inquiry? I think some people can do it by themselves to some degree.

Having somebody skilled in it who really done it for some time helps a great deal. And some people can do it. I don't know whether everybody can do it, but some people can do it. I've written books. Purpose of the book is that so people can learn how to do it. We have online courses actually about inquiry now that some people can take. We believe people can learn to do it. Just like mindfulness is something people can do, can learn to do. Inquiry is similar to mindfulness. It starts with mindfulness and goes a little further by it's more dynamic, more engaged than mindfulness.

Because it engages the experience instead of just being aware of it. Got it. And so if people are inquiring, the idea is to keep coming back to what the direct experience is, and the direct response that you're getting from your inquiry. That's very central for the inquiry is the direct immediate experience. Because really, if we stay with the direct immediate experience, in time, we will get in touch with the source of immediacy itself, which is our essential nature. I've done a few different types of inquiry, but I once did a little bit of work with somebody who had been trained in the diamond approach. And what I noticed was, I think sort of what you've described,

which is when they asked me what's going on, I had a lot of like, I'm not really sure, because I'm not used to paying attention in this way. Very true. So we teach first people how to pay attention. We have meditation practices. Some of them are awareness of what's happening. Some of them are concentration on some parts of it.

A person needs these initial skills to be able to engage inquiry. Just like meditation, you need special skills. So these skills are given at the beginning of our teaching, beginning of the path. Because some people have them to some degree. Many people don't have them. How to feel oneself, how to stay with feeling oneself instead of rationalizing or running away from it.

And then staying with it in a way that we can inspect it. We can ask questions about it, delve into it. That's another capacity that people need to develop. So you're right about all of these things. It's a skill, and that's why inquiry is not you learn it or you don't learn it. It's more you learn it little by little,

and you get better and better at it. The better you get at it, the easier it is, and the faster it goes, the deeper you go in a short period of time. Excellent. You have said once that this is not about changing yourself. The quote is, you do whatever you do in your life, and then study what's happening. That's all you need to do.

Study your life to understand it. Yeah. If I try to change myself, it means trying to change myself means I'm not letting myself experience what I'm experiencing right now. So how can I inquire into it if I'm trying to change it, if I wanted to change? I'm already interfering. So wanting to change experience is an interference of the experience or rejection of the experience, which means the experience is not there just by itself. It has to be there by itself, as it is for me to find out what it is, what is its meaning. The motivation, though, to often do inquiry or spiritual work is because the experiences we're having are generally not pleasant or they're not what we want them to be so there's a there this is always that paradox

we talk about with spiritual work which is on one hand i need to leave it alone. I need to leave experience alone enough to truly observe it and let it be. And yet, the beginning motivation tends to come from because I don't like what experience is giving me. Yes. For most people, that's how they start. So it takes time for somebody to learn the pure motivation, which is to love truth. I call it loving truth for its own sake. That is a very refined skill that a human being can develop. At the beginning, yes, we have motivation. We have goals and aims. We don't like this. We want to change that.

So the way we deal with that is we include that in the inquiry. That's part of what's there. If I feel anxious, but I also feel I don't want to be anxious, I'm aware also I don't want to be anxious. That's part of what I inquire into. Why do I not want to be anxious? You see what I mean? So I inquire into the desire to change it.

I inquire into the desire to make a difference or I don't like it. That's frequently the beginning of what I inquire into. We include the reaction or the attitude and the inquiry. We just keep circling back to what am I experiencing? What am I experiencing? Exactly, because if I want to change it, that's part of what I am experiencing. Right.

Everything is included. Oftentimes when we're describing this sort of thing to people, we'll say something, and I do it, something along the lines of, allow everything to be exactly the way it is, which is a wonderful teaching, except when you can't do it. Yeah, but you see, allowing to be what it is, is the highest teaching there is.

Meaning most teaching, their highest state is to let themselves be. Just be themselves without any attempt at change. However, that's not an easy place to be. It's the final result. However, we use it in our practice as a beginning. We don't have it completely, but we are oriented that way. We know that trying to change something is not going to work for us, that we are standing in our own way.

So little by little, we develop the attitude of just the love to know, the love of discovery, which we all have. Yes. If you were to sort of sum up what you keep saying about inquiry, one way of saying it would be become consistently curious about what's happening exactly consistently curious loving to find out what is going on with me and which turns out what am i what is the meaning of my experience what is the meaning of my existence all will come if i keep staying with my experience. 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. Brian Kranson 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. One of the things that pulls us out of curiosity most often is pain. And so, on one hand, the antidote for pain is to be curious, but what are other qualities that can help us stay with the curiosity? Obviously, different levels of pain are different. There are people who have severe trauma. That level of pain to remain with is a different animal, and I'm not really talking about that. I'm talking more about, you know, the run of the mill types of pain that a lot of us experience, emotional pain that

we want to turn away from. So curiosity is one sort of key orientation. Are there others? Oh, yeah, many. Curiosity is one of them. The other one is courage, courage and boldness, because to stay with pain requires strength and boldness and an adventurous spirit. That is another spiritual quality, because curiosity is really an expression of one aspect of essence. Boldness or courage is an expression of another aspect of essence and steadfastness which meaning

you stay with it you're bold to go into it but you're steadfast you keep staying with it you don't get distracted you don't go away from it and there's the love the love to know to know the truth the love to know reality which becomes the love to know, to know the truth, the love to know reality, which becomes the love to know God or whatever, you know, can develop. So these are some of the qualities. There are others, but these are some of the basic ones. The other one is kindness. Kindness toward oneself. It's not a matter of pushing oneself.

It's not a matter of being hard on oneself. It's a matter of being gentle on oneself. It's not a matter of being hard on oneself. It's a matter of being gentle with oneself. It's approaching our experience with gentleness because we're already having a hard time. So we don't want to push. We don't want to do it from a hard place. If we do it from perspective, I want to change. It's a hard place. We're rejecting it. So part of letting it be is a kindness, is a loving kindness that is there with the pain. And the pain requires really kindness more than anything else.

And the more kindness we feel toward ourselves, the more we're able to stay with the difficulty, with the pain. In fact, the main thing that helps us stay with the pain is kindness, and the love and kindness that all human beings have, but they might not have complete access to it, but we can access it more and more as we see what's in its way. Yes, I have found all those qualities to be imminently useful and critical. And then, you know, all of it turns into realizing that all those are qualities that I only possess some of the time. You know, that's where I think that kindness sort of comes in most importantly, is to go, well, you know what, I gave it my best effort there. I'll come back and give it my best effort again and again and again.

Because I think perfectionism is a great enemy. Perfectionism is being hard on oneself. You know, because you can't be perfect. And to accept our limitations and to be with them, be gentle with them. And another quality also I want to mention is clarity and precision. Meaning meaning I don't just want to know what I'm experiencing. I want to know it exactly as it is. So it's not like, well, I sort of feel a little bit disturbed. You might find that a little disturbed means I'm really pissed off.

That is more precise. You see what I mean? So precision meaning you really want to know, be exact about what you are experiencing. The exactness is important. Is some of that just a broader emotional vocabulary? What are some things that guide us in exactness or precision? precision, clarity, specificity, particularness. All these help us recognize what is really happening. Like sometimes people cannot tell the difference between sadness and kindness.

You see, because it's very close. They both have warmth to them, materialness to them, but they're really slightly different. The sadness is an emotion happening in the heart, while the kindness is a subtle, warm atmosphere that is gentle and it's not exactly sadness. It has more of a healing energy to it. And you could differentiate, separate the two. If you stay with them, you try to want to be more precise about what's happening. That's a really good example as someone who often feels great emotion,

which can manifest as tears, but realizing it has nothing to do with sadness. Exactly. That's a great example of an emotional precision. Yes, and that's very important for inquiry. The more precise we are, the more effective is the inquiry. Excellent. Well, any other ideas on how to strengthen our power of inquiry that are easy to describe? Well, many of them.

All the qualities of our essential nature are actually needed. The more of them are there, the more effective is our inquiry. If we have a couple of them, we're doing pretty good. But the more of them we have, the more effective and powerful our inquiry, which means the bigger is the openness and the expansion, and the deeper we go. Another quality is what I call intelligence or brilliance. And what intelligence means is the capacity to synthesize. You hold everything together in a way where you could see their interconnectedness. So synthesis is a capacity some people have, but we can develop. So it's not a matter of just, it is this and it's

not that. When you see all the pieces, what is it that brings them together? Because putting them together is what will reveal the meaning of the mold. That's another quality and aspect in being, which has to do with the radiance or brilliance of our essence. The radiance shines through from underneath, through all the parts, revealing their underlying unity, what connects them. That would be the insight to them. Excellent. Well, Hamid, I think this is a great place for us to wrap up. Thanks so much for spending some time with us going deeper into how

inquiry works and how we can make it useful in our own lives. I appreciate the opportunity to talk about inquiry and the fact that I have a book about inquiry. We have an online course now about inquiry, an audio

course on inquiry too. And we'll have links in the show notes to all of your different pieces and things that people can learn from you. I know you did a couple of courses with Sounds True also. So there is a lot of material out there and we'll have some links to it. One thing I want people to know, it's important, that's coming up, is an online course that we're calling spirituality in a fractured world which will begin next year and it is really relevant it is inquiry into our experience but in the world we are in which is a difficult world these days with division and polarization

and politics and all of that many people people are scared or angry, whatever. We are doing a course of how to deal with these things using the inquiry we're talking about. That's great. That's a great course idea. Which I think will be very useful because many people don't know what to do with all these things that's happening with them. Yes.

So how to use spiritual qualities and practices to deal with these things that's happening with them. So how to use spiritual qualities and practices to deal with these things and how to also act with other people from this place so there can be more harmony, more understanding. Well, we can certainly use more harmony and understanding. There's no doubt about that.

Especially these days. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Well, thank you so much, Hamid. It's been a real pleasure talking with you again. A pleasure talking to you, Eric. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community.

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