Tami Simon: Hello, friends. My name’s Tami Simon and I’m the founder of Sounds True, and I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge. I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform. It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original, premium transformational docuseries, community events, classes to start your day and relax in the evening, special weekly live shows, including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an after-show community question-and-answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us. Explore, come have fun with us, and connect with others. You can learn more at Join.SoundsTrue.com.
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Welcome, friends. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is someone whom I really learn a whole heck of a lot from, A.H. Almaas—which is the pen name for Hameed Ali. I remember hearing Hameed once described how there are some people who can achieve a certain level of realization, other people who can then help others achieve a level of realization. And then, there’s a third possibility which is that someone could create a methodology, a school, a pathway for many people across generations to find what, in the Diamond Approach is known as true nature, to find true nature. And in my experience, knowing Hameed Ali, he’s someone who does all three.
OK, I’m going to go out on a limb here. He’s someone that I consider to be a type of spiritual genius. OK, I said it. I’ve been doing this a long time, and I’m getting more bold. And there you go. Let me tell you a little bit more about Hameed. He was born in Kuwait, and he’s been living in the United States since he was 18 years old. He’s the founder, I mentioned, of the Diamond Approach to self-realization, which is a contemporary teaching that developed within the context of both ancient spiritual teachings and current theories of modern depth psychology.
He’s the author of more than 20 books, and I’ll just share with you some of my favorites. The Unfolding Now, Runaway Realization, Spacecruiser Inquiry, and a new book. It makes the favorite list. It’s called Nondual Love: Awakening to the Loving Nature of Reality. And that’s what we’re going to be talking about in our conversation.
With Sounds True, Hameed’s created several in-depth learning programs, a series on the Diamond Approach, another on Presence, and an audio interview series on Endless Enlightenment: The View of Totality in the Diamond Approach. Hameed, welcome.
A.H. Almaas: Good to be with you, Tami, again.
TS: Thank you.
AHA: Old friends.
TS: There’s so many different ways that I could ask you to introduce the Diamond Approach, but I want to ask you to do that by referring to the near-death experience that you write about in quite some detail in Nondual Love. It’s in the final chapter on The Gift of Grace. And my question is, how did this near-death experience that happened to you in your early twenties, how did it change you?
You write that, before the experience, you weren’t particularly interested in spirituality as a focus of your attention. But then, afterwards, the Diamond Approach, this path, started emerging. What happened during your near-death experience that created this shift, if you credit it at all with the shift?
AHA: It was a near-death experience, but different from what you hear and read about upon near-death experience, people talk about seeing a tunnel and light in the tunnel and this and that. Very well known, many people have that experience. My experience wasn’t like that. I didn’t see a tunnel, I didn’t see a light, I didn’t see any of that, and more I just was myself in some kind of spacious, peaceful, medium, expanse. And what I was, was a presence that had faceted—colored facets of different kinds. So, I felt like I’m a diamond of presence, and diamond in the sense of faceted, clear, sharp, but also presence, being that presence, and diamond that, in time, afterwards, I learned each one had a meaning, which I didn’t know, at the time. I was just feeling that.
But I was in this vastness, this beautiful, peaceful, black, very completely black vastness. William Shatner writes about his experience looking at the blackness of space when he went up in the rocket, and he said, it was empty, terrifying. But the blackness I saw was peaceful, friendly, blissful, and felt completely inviting, and I felt I could go just there, into that darkness and into that universe of intimacy.
But then, when I looked, I was like high up from my body. I look down, see my body, see the world, see the streets and all that, the people. And so, like I said, I could go one or way or another. It felt like I had two ways I can go. I can go leave the body and finish, go on to that blissful expanse, or I could go back into the world.
And then, as I was contemplating that, I noticed two facets begin to shine much more strongly, a pink one and a yellow one. Beautiful pink, beautiful yellow. And the feeling is love and joy. Later on, I learned that pink is one way of experiencing love, and yellow, the color, when one experiences spiritual joy. And the pink and joy, basically, made the choice to go into the body, both for love and joy, and to bring love and joy.
TS: As you talk about it, it sounds a little bit, to me, your life story here, hearing this, like a sci-fi movie, in a way. Meaning, this near-death experience and now the human is a diamond-faceted presence, transformed, totally. And now, communicating a path that’s helpful to other people. I’m wondering how you make sense of this transformation, turning point in your life.
AHA: Well, I mean, it took time for me to really learn the importance of that experience and how it was a fork. So, for some kind of transitional place. I wasn’t overtly interested in spiritual things, at that time. I was interested more in knowing what is the truth about things, about reality, about the world. And this experience, how it changed me is that, afterward, my life moved in such a way where the truth of reality became an inner truth.
Before that, I was studying physics and math, science and all. That’s how I thought I’m going to find out the truth of reality. So, it’s the same love and interest and the truth, but got shifted, turned around inward into an, what is the inner truth of reality? Not, what can be experimented on and measured, physically. So, the desire was already there for the truth, from earlier on, but I didn’t recognize it as an inner truth until that time happened.
TS: And I want to ask you two further questions about that. One is, I’ve heard you describe the work of deepening our understanding of the Diamond Approach as inner work, that the school based on the Diamond Approach is an inner-work school. What do you mean by inner work?
AHA: Well, I mean, that’s the description that Gurdjieff started, that expression, inner work. Inner work means working about your innards, about your subjective experience. So, it’s not work, in the sense most people know what work is. You go to work, you make and earn a living, or be an artist, produce this, and all that kind of work. And this work is working with one’s consciousness, with one’s experience, and how one is experiencing oneself and the world and reality. And working with it to sort of understand it, to penetrate it, to eliminate it. So, it’s inner in that sense. It’s basically work that happens within the consciousness about the content of consciousness itself.
TS: And I’ve also heard you describe the Diamond Approach as a path that’s attractive to people who love the truth. And you talked about how you were looking for truth, originally, external objects through physics, and then after this experience, inwardly. What does it mean to love the truth?
AHA: Well, many people love the truth but they don’t necessarily love it the way I think about it. Loving the truth, many people come to spiritual work feeling many ways that the movement inward, the movement toward liberation happened like wanting freedom, wanting enlightenment, wanting liberation, wanting freedom from suffering, wanting the meaning of reality, wanting God, the divine, wanting union with the ultimate. All these things, people go inward.
For me, the way it happened and the way, the path that developed became the central organizing principle is that, what opens the path more than anything else. If you love the truth—truth of anything—for what it is, not what we get from it. So, love is inherently—if we know what love is, is inherently selfless, inherently giving. So, loving the truth, means loving it for what it is, loving the truth not because I want something from it, it’s just curiosity and a drive to understand, to comprehend. Not mentally, but through a direct immediate intimacy with whatever truth. And so, the truth is not just one thing.
Many teaching take the truth means the ultimate truth, knowing the Brahman or the dharmakāya or the divine essence. In the path I’m working with, the truth can be started with a very simple thing, is the truth that there is talking happening between you and me. That is true. There is truth that we want to discuss something about love. That is truth. And then, there’s the truth of what is love? and there is the truth of what is the nature of the universe? The truth… I mean, one truth for instance is, the world is made out of atoms. That is a certain kind of truth. It’s not false, it’s true. But there is also another truth, that the world is made out of consciousness.
And then, what does that mean? What is that truth, of consciousness? And so, loving truth means being curious about it whatever way we find it, whatever way truth appears in our experience. All the truth and all its love, they’re all interconnected, and the connecting thread is the truth, the fact that they are true. In our world, these days, they say truth is being lost. There’s a lot of misinformation and all of that. That thing can happen, of course, about external things, but no misinformation can deviate from the fact of knowing what I’m feeling, what I am. My perception of myself, my perception of reality, is beyond the stories, and that happens by following what is the truth.
And so, the truth has many—it’s a continuum of levels of what truth is, from what I call the relative truth, which is what most people know. It’s true, we are talking through, this is just such and such a time, you are in Canada, I’m in the US. That’s all true. To the truth of, the hearts are open, there’s openness, there’s interest. And then, there’s the truth of, where is this interest? Where is the curiosity coming from? And if you go into that, that is also a truth. And then, we find that coming from some deep place beyond the mind. And that is truth. And what is that? That is truth. Until we get to, what spiritual teaching called the ultimate truth, and all that? That’s truth, too.
So, truth, for me, is a continuum. And all of them, all the levels, of the degrees of truth, have in them, the common thing is truth. And truth, when we really follow it, if we are curious about it, if we love to find out what it is, and we manage to really find out what’s in the truth of anything we’re exploring, it’s liberating. It’s inherently illuminating, and that illumination is inherently liberating. So, it brings up all what people want—the liberation, the meaning of life, and the enlightenment, realization, ultimate truth. All that appeared as we explore what the truth of anything, we just go deep into it.
TS: Right here, as we begin our conversation and we explore your new book, Nondual Love, I want to share a truthful confession. Which is, I have an agenda, and my agenda is that I want to bring as much of our audience with us as we have this conversation as possible. I want to keep them listening, understanding, inquiring into their own knowing, as they hear us talking. And as I engaged in reading Nondual Love, some big questions came up for me, that I really want to ask you now, even if it brings us into some deep-end territory where some people may start to get lost, and I might slow you down a little bit as the listener advocate that I am. All right?
AHA: That was good.
TS: OK. So, the very first chapter of the book, you say, “I’m going to introduce you to a new dimension.” A new dimension. And you introduce the boundless dimensions. And you go on to talk about one of the things that keeps us from really understanding—this is, at least, what I got from reading this first chapter, which I read more than once, Hameed, I’ll say. One of the things that keeps us from really appreciating and knowing the boundless dimension is that, we’re stuck in this idea of an experiencer who’s having an experience. And as long as we’re an experiencer experiencing the boundless dimension, we’re not really knowing the boundless dimension.
So, that that’s kind of—I read that and I was like, “OK, this brings up a really big question for me which is, how do I know anything? How do I know anything if it’s not an experience?” But yet, you’re saying, there’s no experience without an experiencer.
So, I want to know, what’s knowing? What’s experience without an experiencer? And if you don’t want to use the word experience for that, what word are you going to use?
AHA: Well, I mean, people use the word experience, and sometimes they use the word knowing, and sometimes they use the word awareness, or perception. All these are different ways when we can approach this topic or this angle of things. And basically, because your question nearly points to the part of the title, the book Nondual Love to nondual.
TS: Yes.
AHA: And nondual love is one way we experience the nondual. A nondual reality or nondual realization or nondual perception is basically no separation between the experiencer and the experienced. There’s no subject and object dichotomy. So, that is basic to nondual experience and all the nondual teachings, all the nondual tradition that what knows and what is known are the same thing.
And the same thing, that doesn’t mean like the head knowing the body, the mind know. I don’t mean that. I mean, the medium itself, the expanse itself knows itself, and aware of itself, knows itself, experiences itself by being itself. Because it’s the very nature. Very nature of divine—I’m talking about love here. Or you could say, awareness, of its very nature in a nondual experience.
What is experienced as nondual is a kind of consciousness, kind of presence, kind of almost a substantial expanse that, of its very nature is self-knowing. And self-knowing, not in the mental sense, but knowing by being, through touch, almost like touch. Just like touching something. It says, “Oh, this is soft, this is rough.” It’s intimate that way, but more. Your finger is inside the hand, really, becoming one with the hand. This hand become one, and separate from each other, and know themselves as hands. So, that is of the nature of nondual experience, in general, and which many spiritual teaching aim at. My path, it’s something that arose naturally by being interested in the truth, and realizing that the truth can show itself as a nondual expanse, as a non-dual dimension.
We mentioned dimension. I talked about my dimension. The reason I would talk about dimension is, many nondual teachings talk about the expanse as a particular expanse. Sometime, it is consciousness, sometime it’s awareness, sometime it’s empty clarity, and that is—but that makes it sound like that nondual expanse can only be one way. And I’m saying, no, the nondual expanse has dimension and its meaning. It is the same expanse but can appear as awareness, can appear as presence, can appear as emptiness, can appear as love. So, these are called dimensions. Dimension is not like this stacked top of each other, it’s the same thing, manifesting himself in a slightly different way.
So, pure awareness is awareness glittering the perceptivity of perceiving itself, where the perceiver, the perceived are the same thing, the same thing as the act of perception. Or becomes that’s pure awareness or can be pure presence that knows itself, by knowing itself as it is beingness, and the presence, and the fullness. That is, by itself, pure knowing, pure knowledge. So, knowing the medium itself although is pure being or pure existence, it knows itself that way. The knowing and the being are the same thing. It’s the same thing in Vedanta called Satcitananda. Sat is existence, cit is consciousness. But they’re not saying they’re two things, it’s the same thing.
And I say, you could say that these are dimensions. I make them into dimension, because it can appear sometime as completely just consciousness, or it can appear as just love, or it can appear as just presence. And when that appears that way, I call it a dimension. All can appear as all of them there together, inseparable from each other as one thing, and that can manifest itself in different ways.
TS: Well, you’re right, Hameed, that my question goes directly to the title, the nondual part of the Nondual Love title. And I wanted to ask you more about this and I want to continue to, because I think there’s a lot of confusion when people hear the term nondual. Some people maybe understand it very deeply. I know, often, when I talk to people, it’s just very abstract and I’m not sure what they’re understanding as they talk to me about it.
And in terms of deepening our understanding, right now, I asked you, what word would you use? And you said, you could use a word like, I think you said self-knowing, and then perception. Do you need a self dash word? So, it’s like self-perceiving. There’s no experiencer, so the experience is being self-known. Nothing separate from it. That’s what I want to understand this knowing quality.
AHA: The word self here does not mean there is a self.
TS: Right.
AHA: It is an expression. Self-knowing, meaning knowing what it is. So, knowing is just an English expression that refers to knowingness that happens on its own, without the knowing being separate from the known. The knowing and the known are the same thing. The knower and the known are the same thing, and neither of them is a self.
However, if you go in Indian tradition, they’re called, the ultimate self or the higher self. Not an individual, a human self the way most people have a self. But in Buddhism, they don’t call it self, they’re called selflessness. It’s the same thing.
TS: Once again, describe for me experience where there is a total collapse of a subject/object, duality.
AHA: I might—
TS: It’s experience. It’s experience, right? It has to be experience.
AHA: It has to be experience in the sense there’s awareness and consciousness, and we call it experience. But frequently, people, when they think of experience, they think they must be an individual experiencer, like a human being who experiences something, like experiencing harassment or something like that. There’s a somebody there. But here, if we talk about experience, it does not mean there is an individual that is experiencing.
I’m not saying this to say there’s something wrong with a human being experiencing things. That’s another way of experience. It’s just not what’s called nondual. You see, nondual is one way of experiencing reality, dual way is another way. You can be an individual experiencing the expanse as part of the expanse, as a cell in the larger body, as a wave in the ocean. That way, you can’t be an individual, but however you can be the ocean, knowing yourself as the ocean. And the ocean here is, in this book, is love.
TS: You write in Nondual Love about your own discovery when you were in Maui, in Hana, and how this—
AHA: Hana, Maui. Yes.
TS: Yes. This knowing of nondual love emerged. It gets so tricky with language, Hameed. I can’t say it emerged to you. I’m not going to say that. But it emerged in experience. I won’t say, your experience. But anyway, tell us the story. What happened?
AHA: Well, we were just arrived, drove to Hana, Hawai’i, in Maui. We went to see Hana, my wife and myself. And I was tired, so I put stuff in the bedroom. I laid in the bed, turned on the TV, just to relax, not because I wanted to watch anything. I looked, and there was a Western, I think. And I felt I was in the TV. I said, “Oh, that’s odd. What does it mean? I am there.”
So, that was odd. So, I got out of the of the place, the cottage, into outside. It was like, lava, trees, and flowers and all that, and I felt, “Oh, I am there in the tree. I am here.” I realized I was feeling myself, not just in TV, I was everywhere. And when I felt I was everywhere, it became—the thing that is everywhere became obvious as a kind of wonderful, beautiful medium of softness, and gentleness, and blissfulness, and lovingness that I ended up calling divine love.
So, that’s how it happened. I mean, it appeared in a few steps. It didn’t take—so, it was few minutes before, finally, I was an ocean of love as it’s appearing in all those places, because it manifests through everything. That’s why, sometime, I call it universal love.
TS: You talk about how with these boundless dimensions, like the boundless dimension of love, or awareness, presence, there’s this sense of omnipresence, omni-knowing. And yet, even in an experience like the one you described, you were in Maui, you were in a place. So, I think that’s one of the things that can sometimes get confusing.
There’s this sense of, it’s boundless, it’s everywhere, but we only actually know about kind of what’s—well, for many of us, if we even have an experience like this, if an experience like this emerges—I’m not going to get us stuck on language, but you can see how I’m trying to break the habit of the experiencer. Anyway, there still seems to be a limit of what we sense and know. It doesn’t actually feel boundless.
AHA: There’s limited perception, right? And the reason why we say it’s boundless is that, there is the sense, both visual and sensate, that this medium extends indefinitely. We don’t see a limit to infinity. You see through the trees, through the mountain, through the sky, through the stars and trees. It is everywhere there.
Now, to say it is completely everywhere in the universe is actually an extrapolation. I think the nondual teaching, they take it as a verified truth that it is everywhere when somebody wakes up to the boundless. In my sense, my take on it is that, the perception seem to see and to feel endlessly, but endlessly doesn’t mean necessarily infinite or everywhere. That is in the mind, coming in and extrapolating. Since I don’t see an end of it, it must go everywhere and must have no end, which means they see to the end of the universe, all the way through the whole universe.
I don’t see the whole universe, of course. I don’t know. So that when people say, “Well, boundless means it’s infinite.” That is the experience of the one who’s experiencing it. Is it actually when I’m experiencing that way, is it really when I’m experiencing that way, is it really everywhere in the universe? That’s a good question to ask. But that is the experience. That’s usually the realization of nondual experience, of nonduality, that it feels that I am here and everywhere, and not only everywhere, throughout all time. One indivisible expanse.
And the infinity, I think, there’s a sense of it and feeling is a perceptual sense. However, it’s not like, when I’m say I’m everywhere, I’m also can perceive myself in Alpha Centauri. No, I’m not seeing Alpha Centauri. So, to say I am in Alpha Centauri, is just extending my experience and perception. “Since I see no end to it, it must be also in Alpha Centauri.”
So, it becomes sort of a linguistic kind of an issue, what is the truth of it? When I say boundless, is it boundless in an absolute true sense, or is it boundless in my experience?
TS: Right. Well, boundless, in the sense that, you can’t necessarily find the edge, and you don’t know where the edge is. But it doesn’t mean you have a knowing of what’s happening in all of these other times and places.
AHA: Nobody. None of the nondual beings, a human being, who have nonduality who know what’s happening in other places. Nobody claimed that. But the experience is no end to what I experience, my being or my consciousness is.
And the conclusion from it, that it is everywhere, I take issue with that, saying it is really everywhere, as saying, well, that is really, in some sense, a mental extrapolation. It’s meant everywhere. True, I don’t see an end of it, so it’s a reasonable extrapolation, right? But still, an extrapolation. The important thing in the experience, the experience I feel, there’s no end to my sense of being. Or the love I’m experiencing has an ocean with no shores. That’s how the Sufis call it, “An ocean with no shores.”
TS: Now, I’m curious, Hameed, that person who’s listening, who says, “OK, I’m interested in understanding nonduality. I think I can perhaps touch that experience for moments during this conversation. But then, I come back to being a person puttering around my kitchen. I’m an individual person. I’m listening to this conversation. A part of me wonders if I even care. I’m not sure if I care. I think I care. Tami sure seems to care.” What would you say to that person who’s sort of going in and out of touching—
AHA: I mean, for most people, it is like that. They go in and out, and most people can’t stay in the same place. That is of permanent realization, which is unusual for most people. But it’s possible. In fact, spiritual paths, that is their aim, is to make it a permanent state, that you’re always in that condition of nonduality.
And so, even though I’m puttering in the kitchen, I don’t lose sight to the fact that it is an endless being puttering in the kitchen. I mean, the possibility, I think, for listeners, I’m saying it’s possible to live a normal life and continue to be aware of a nondual. It’s like, reality, in some sense.
One way of saying it is, a reality, in some sense, has two sides to it. The front side, which is our life, what we do, driving a car, all of that. And the backside of it is that, it is always a kind of expanse, medium, love or consciousness that is filling, and expressing itself as all of these things, expressing itself as a car, as one driving the car, as one eating a meal, as the food, as everything.
So, there are two sides of it, and one can be aware of both sides at the same time. In fact, one has to be aware of both sides to be able to live.
TS: Well, you might only have to be aware of the front side to live, you don’t have to be aware of the—
AHA: Yes, you have to be—
TS: —nondual.
AHA: Most people are aware only on the front side. Realization mean you’re also aware of the back side or the inner side, you call it. And you can’t be aware of it constantly. Not possible. And that’s called liberation. If you’re aware of it constantly, you are free, because that medium is total freedom. There’s nothing limiting it, nothing constricting, it doesn’t suffer, it doesn’t have conflicts, doesn’t obsess. None of that. It is just simply that expands itself, that is the total peace and contentment.
TS: Now, this front side, the side of us that’s identified with the physicality of everything, the visible form of everything, you have a very funny metaphor that you bring out in Nondual Love about Jabba the Hutt. And how this Jabba the Hutt character from Star Wars who—I looked it up, and so I could—I didn’t remember Jabba the Hutt. But this gangster figure who’s huge and just a giant body, giant neck and everything. And I was like, “Oh, Jabba the Hutt. When do I feel like Jabba the Hutt?” And I wonder if you can describe this, and how this metaphor came to you?
AHA: Yes. Because the reason I have a way of looking at the nondual as having dimensions is because, seeing, experiencing it in one of its dimension reveals one of the obstacles against the nondual. One of the barriers or some limitations that make us not experience the nondual.
So, love, nondual love revealed that a side of what we call the self, as similar to Jabba the Hutt. Meaning, somebody inherent in the self, the ego self. A sense of greed, bottomless greed, desire, and obsessiveness, and pleasure without concern for others, and sort of our animal side magnified in the human way. So, Jabba the Hutt represents that.
Jabba the Hutt, basically, the movie, the film, the second Star War movie, actually, it starts with Jabba the Hutt with Harrison Ford there as Han Solo. They brought him Han Solo. He was going to be one of his possessions. Some kind of soldier or somebody whose job is to find thing, find people, brought him Han Solo, but he was sort of like in a frozen state. He was still alive, but he was some kind of frozen state in a big cabinet, and he is sort of covered with wax or made out of wax. And he put him there as one of his possessions, and he had dancers, and he had people serving him, and he was eating food all the time.
So, it is just greed for more food, more pleasure, more music, more… So, that is inherent in the ego self, and that sense of ego can be challenged by the experience of love, because love is a sense of abundance. Love of fullness, sense of fullness, and abundance true abundance, true richness, true feeling rich and abundant. Not by having thing, but you are the abundance itself.
When one doesn’t have that, then their self wants that abundance, and somehow the ego knows there is such a thing as abundance, but misinterpret it as possessing things. And possessing things is not just objects, but activities, pleasures and all kind of things. So, Jabba the Hutt is a great representation. I think Lucas did a good job by creating Jabba the Hutt who’s big and so full of fat, full of his greed and his fat, and his greed for money, possession, power, pleasure. All of that is endless. And it’s one way we can experience that.
I mean, I actually experienced myself that way one time. After I experienced divine love, the self appeared that way. And I said, “What’s that?” I said, “Well, it feels like Jabba the Hutt in the movie.” I mean, I wasn’t really Jabba the Hutt, but it felt like that, in the sense of being big, and full of desires and wants, and endless greed, and self-centered, and desire for power and control. I mean, it’s an animal side in the human being that is unbridled, unchecked.
So, that is one of the—actually, everybody has Jabba the Hutt in them. That’s the point in the book. I’m not saying, “I experienced Jabba the Hutt, and so there is such a thing.” Actually, no. Every human being, actually, within their sense of self, there is something like Jabba the Hutt, and that need to be experienced and acknowledged and metabolized. Meaning, to let our self be that and understand, “Wow, what is it? Where’s it come from?” When we explore, it’s come from reality. It’s come from true fullness, true richness, true abundance, which is the pure love that is everywhere.
So, when you’re recognizing yourself as the divine love, nondual love, you are the whole universe.
TS: You also draw this connection with light, experiencing ourselves as light, and actually light pervading our body and everything, as this one indicator or one sense of divine love as sort of the antithesis, if you will, to the Jabba the Hutt character. Sort of like, the more light and lightness of being we know, the less Jabba the Hutt is—
AHA: The thing about this dimension of love is that, love is inseparable from the fact it is also light, feels like it is an ocean of light, with its own self luminosity. It’s a light, not like light rays, no, it’s like an ocean, like liquid light, almost. It is self-luminous and feels light, like light. It has no weight. It’s both light in the sense of illumination, and light in the sense it has no weight. So, it feels light in terms of no weight, light in the sense of emotional lightness. Light, joyful light, but also light in some nomination.
So, the nondual love is also nondual light. And light is consciousness. Light and consciousness are inseparable. So, nondual love, the fact that it is light, shows that love has its own self-knowing, its own consciousness of itself. That is where the consciousness, the light is itself, love. One way is like a slight shift of perspective. It is love, it is also light. It is heart, but it is also pure illumination, at the same time. So, the true love, it is illuminated, it is illumination itself. It is light itself and it illuminates. Lovingly. That’s the thing.
You see, awareness illuminates, but not unlovingly, but not explicitly lovingly. Love is easier for people to handle because everybody wants love. Everybody wants some tenderness, some softness, some gentleness, being pleased, being appreciated, because that is a quality of love. It’s something about human beings. They need love to survive. They need love to thrive. When you ask most people, look at the culture, look at our literature, look at our arts, look at all the songs. How many songs are there about awareness or consciousness?
TS: A short playlist. Yes.
AHA: And how many about love? Yes. Right? Love is all you need, as the song says, right? As a human being, from being infants, without love, we can’t thrive. Awareness is already there, implicit. People don’t feel they want awareness because they feel they have awareness. They don’t know that awareness can be a lot more than that, you see? But there is paucity of love. People don’t feel there is enough love, so they always desire for love.
That’s why the dimension—and one reason I wrote about nondual love, I bring the nonduality, which many teaching talk about nonduality, but I’m bringing it as love, because love something is a human being can relate to, a human being feels they need, they want. They want to be loved, and it makes them happy to love. And in fact, the more somebody is loving, the more they have a heart, the more say we say, they are really human. This is actually what makes a human being a human, is the love that emerges from the heart.
TS: When you talk about the light nature of nondual love, it’s easy to sense that in, for me, in a greater impersonal kind of boundless way. But when you talk about how the heart needs love, it starts feeling more personal, but yet you’re describing in Nondual Love this greater than subject/object dimension of love. But the light part is easier, I think, to connect with in this boundless way. Why is that?
AHA: Well, I mean, light is easier for people to experience, in general, because people talk about light, seeing light, dancing light. For some reason, I don’t know. I mean, it just happened. But because it is also love, the light and the love are the same thing, really. Although, sometimes, people just say, white light, they see white light, the light of the nondual love is a golden light, yellowish golden light. That’s because it’s love, it has the quality of heart, it’s mind and heart together. Light represent mind, and love represent heart. And the mind is illumination, the heart is appreciation, at the same time. Inseparable.
And it happened to be, the divine love, is not just because of light. It is light, it has no weight. No, it is of its very nature. It has no weight, and you feel like no gravity. And also, you are an ocean with no gravity. You’re a boundless ocean, and that boundless ocean can also—although, I can be the boundless ocean and feel everything is in me, everything is made out of me as the boundless love, and that is light.
Also, that boundless ocean can express itself through a human being, personally, toward another human being or toward an environment or any other being. I mean, it makes people loving. The more one experience the divine love, the more loving one behaves in the world.
So, it brings the back to the front. The front appears as more appreciative, more illuminating, more loving, more gentle, more empathic, wanting the good of the other.
TS: You have this phrase, living daylight. And I remember the first time I read that, and immediately, the whole room, went into this beautiful light yellow quality. And I thought, “What a gorgeous phrase, living daylight.” Just the power of two words together like that. Share with our listeners more what you mean by that, Hameed, living daylight.
AHA: It’s one way of experiencing divine love or nondual love as—One of the beginning way of experience, the lighter way, before we experience it in its vastness, it is living daylight. I call it living daylight because it has something to do with fear, it has something to do with the absence of fear. There’s an expression, knock the living daylight out of you, right? What does that mean? I took that expression, the living daylight, because when…
Not just knocked out, not knocked out of you, you actually experience the living daylight. It looks like daylight, in that sense of light, like sun and daytime, daylight. And it’s living, it’s alive, conscious, dynamic, and in a way it deals with fear, with shock, whatever is that, it brings a sense of trust, sense that things are OK, reality is OK, the reality has goodness in it. So, it brings in trust, brings in relaxation, bring in ease, bring no worry, no fear.
TS: If someone has a tendency, no one here on this interview, to be afraid or anxious, how could they work with this notion of living daylight to increase their sense of this loving?
AHA: I think the way you do it, the way I do it is to find out, what are the limit of my trust? I don’t mean trust of somebody else, I mean trusting life, trusting reality, trusting that things will turn out OK, that I’ll be OK. I call it basic trust. Basic trust is the innate, almost pre-conscious sense that I’m at ease and relaxed because there’s inherent sense and knowing that there’s goodness, things will be OK. That goodness is the primary thing in reality. And because of that, thing will be OK.
So, we need to explore our sense—the limitation of that sense of trust, the sense that there is goodness in the universe. Where does that limitation come from? Because the truth is, there is goodness in the universe and it is the divine love itself. The nondual love itself is the goodness. But we don’t know it. And we don’t know it, then there is absence of the sense of being able to feel at home wherever we are, relax, at ease without concern, without paranoia.
So, the ego lives a paranoid life, meaning it’s not completely— they think they’re dangerous, things are not going to facilitate. Now, there’s worry, there’s concern, all kind of stuff. That is a paranoid life, and that because there isn’t enough—I mean that the basic trust I’m talking about is limited. There’s always some basic trust, otherwise you won’t survive. You won’t live. Like, you trust, for instance, that you’ll be able to drive your car. You trust, when you go to sleep, you’re going to wake up the next day. You trust, when you eat your food, that your stomach will work, most of the time, right? That’s, include basic trust in that.
So, everybody has some basic trust, but that can expand, can be much bigger. Now, we can feel at ease and relaxed much of the time because the sense of goodness is palpable, is an innate sense or intuitive sense that goodness is my nature, it’s the nature of the world, the nature of the universe, nature of human beings, and nature of human beings ultimately is goodness. Badness and distortion, an outer expression, because of lack of illumination, lack of understanding.
TS: Hameed, I think many people could say, “Look, I can tell you why my basic trust feels limited. I had a terrible early childhood. I had a difficult birth. I didn’t bond well with my mom. X, Y, Z trauma happened to me in my early first few years of life, this is why. I know why. It’s not that I don’t know why, I know why.”
AHA: I know. And I want people to say these things, because these do limit the basic trust, because my sense of it is that we are born with basic trust and get limited, whittled away by all these things that happen. So, we need to recognize what limited it. All these experiences, embrace them, understand them, work through them, you see? Process them, so they don’t function to limit the innate trust. Because basic trust is innate, inherent. We come into the world with it. The little baby is trusting, is happy, doesn’t think, is not paranoid, usually. Is smiling, and playing, giggling or—I mean, basic trust is what we come, but it get clobbered.
TS: Tell me more what you mean by, work through those experiences. What exactly do you mean by that?
AHA: Sure. It is the hard work of the inner path, what we call inner work. A big part of the inner work is working through those difficulties that created limitations in our experience for ourselves, and of reality. And one of the way it limits our experience, it limits our basic trust. Because if we have basic trust, we are more willing to live fully, more willing to go into our self deeply, more willing to live freely, more willing to express our self, as authentic of way as possible.
But there are all these things that limits us. It limits our sense of our self. We are in pain, we are in contraction, we are small, we are afraid because of all these things that happen. It’s true. That’s the reason. These are the reasons that limit basic trust. And in fact, my discussion of that, basic trust and what limits, is another book, The Facets of Unity. The first part of it, The Facets of Unity book, is about the holy ideas. The first part of it, I discuss living daylight and basic trust, and how the limitation of that leads to all the limitation of the various ego type that are called fixations.
TS: Here, in the context of our conversation about nondual love, help me understand how deepening our sense of basic trust enables us to really appreciate nondual love. Make that connection for people.
AHA: Basic trust is actually the effect in our consciousness, our conscious experience. Or the fact that very deep within us, we are pure love, our pure goodness, that the universe is a pure goodness, and that impacts our conscious experience by us experiencing basic trust.
So, basic trust is the expression, really, of love. The fact that love, which is goodness. Divine love, or nondual love, some people call it divine love, meaning it’s the heart of God. When the heart of God, that is a goodness. When people say divine love or God’s heart, they don’t mean that God has anger in his heart. No, divine love. God’s heart is divine love, pure love, pure abundance, pure goodness. And we can experience that. The more we experience that—even if we have flashing experiences of it, our basic trust is more liberated, if we have more of it. And the more we experience it, the more basic trust. So, the basic trust can expand both by seeing the limit, what limits it, and also by experiencing the love itself.
TS: OK, I have to ask you this question. Bear with me here. But when you were talking about how we’re born with basic trust, the little baby, and then all these things happen. I saw, for whatever reason, inside images of like a baby born in a NICU unit or some fetus in distress, in some way, in the birth process. And I thought, not everyone was born happy, kicking, smiling baby.
AHA: That’s true, but that’s because there are some physical problem happening, or some emotional problem with the mother or the environment. But the normal, ordinary sense that babies are born—even when the parents are terrible parents—the baby is born with trust. They don’t know. I mean, they’re trusting, but it’s like they’re not developed enough to have distrust. Trust is so basic. It requires some mental development to distrust. It requires some negative experience to distrust.
TS: OK, that’s helpful. All right. Do you mind if we go into one more big and important topic? Is that OK?
AHA: Yes, of course. I’m all here.
TS: OK. All right. In Nondual Love, you write, each boundless dimension has what you call a diamond issue. And I thought, “Wow, not only do I and my personality have issues, there are even diamond issues for the boundless dimensions.” OK, just bear with me here. A diamond issue, a particular barrier or obstacle to realizing that dimension. And that the diamond issue when it comes to realizing the boundless dimension of love, has to do with our identification with the body, our identification with being a separate entity, this person in a body.
And what I wanted to understand more, and I’ll just briefly say that, in my own journey, it was so important for me to become embodied. I started out, I don’t know where I was. I was in a conceptual world, thinking about other people’s thoughts. It was so important to come into feeling the sensations of the body. And then, my question is, knowing how important it is to be embodied, how do we make this journey of not having a diamond issue where we’re identified, in some way, with our inner physical sensations?
AHA: Man, I’m glad you bring that up, because I started that way. I was doing a lot of body work at the beginning. I was becoming aware of my body, and really embodied, and fullness, and the resilience of the body, the aliveness of the body. I mean, that was a big part of my work. And I’m liberating the body, basically.
Because in the body, most of the issues we talked about, the difficult limitations, have their counterpart in the body as tension patterns, as pains and aches and constriction. And I mean, people don’t know how constricted their body are, because really, if the body is completely relaxed, at ease, at the beginning, we feel the fullness and the vibrancy and the vigor of the living organism. That’s how the body is liberated. But the more it is liberated, the more the limitations disappear, that become lighter, lighter and lighter.
So, at the present time, when I have my masseur, it was really good body work on me. When their work is really good, the certain part of my body, it disappears. It’s gone from consciousness. When the body is completely, a hundred percent relaxed, there is no sense of body. Space, spaciousness, openness instead of physicality, materiality.
At the beginning, we feel materiality, the aliveness and materiality. And that is a stage, a deeper stage, a deeper relaxation. It feels like that opens up, it become lighter, lighter, lighter until it, at some point, there’s no sense of body. Like right now, I’m talking to you, I don’t feel a sense of a shape of a body, although I know there is a body and has muscles and arms and legs, I could see my hand, but the inner sense is nothing that has a shape or form or size.
So, yes, what you’ve done is great. That is one of the important ways of liberation, is through the body. But then, the true liberation of the body, to become the body fully, and the moment we become the body fully—becoming the body, feeling the body fully doesn’t mean identifying with it, does not mean believing I am the body, because the believing I am the body is not a felt thing, it is the mind.
It’s the thought in the mind, to counter the mind that I am the body. I’m not the body. There is no need for an I that says, “I am this or that.” All that is mental. And that is some of the limitation that become exposed and evaporate. And as they evaporate, there’s no identification of the body. You can feel a body without feeling, “I am the body.” And the next step is that the body itself, the sense of it begins to lighten up, becomes openness, become consciousness, becomes love, become kindness.
TS: And then, this brings us all the way around, actually, to the beginning of our conversation because you mentioned feeling things fully in the body. And I said, that’s where I focused, for a long time, in my spiritual practice. And I started feeling like, “Oh, the way I know things is through these subtle sensations.” And those subtle sensations, subtle perception seems like it’s bodily connected, in some way, and that gives the sense of there being a subject of experience.
So, I’m trying to understand the knowingness that seems like it’s somatic, but if it was “somatic,” if it was in the body, then it wouldn’t be “nondual.” If you’re following me here, Hameed, and I hope our listeners are also with us.
AHA: Yes. I mean, the somatic experience, feeling the body intimately when the body is relaxed, at ease, feeling it’s alive in its figure, is the beginning of the nondual experience. Because if you let that become complete, then there’s nobody feeling the body, it is just a felt sense of physicality, which becomes a felt sense of life, that embodied life, that feels like a life, a fullness of life.
So, that is a wonderful way of actually getting into pure love, pure consciousness, an unbounded sense of being, is through the body. And the path I usually have developed uses that as one of the main modalities of work, inner work, is to feel the body fully. And to feel the body fully is to liberate it from its restriction and constriction that make it not be fully alive. And this constriction, the restrictions that make it not fully alive is the history you talked about. These are, don’t restrict us. Our subjective mind affect how we feel our body.
TS: Right. I think the stuck place is the body being “my body.”
AHA: Yes.
TS: Because there’s only one of them.
AHA: Yes. Oh, and that is sort of the dilemma or the paradox is that, regardless how boundless, how nondual conscious or love is, it always comes through a particular body. Because the fact that I might be experiencing myself as nondual, it is a being who is experiencing a nondual. Nondual needs a particular being to know itself as nondual, and that particular being has a body. So, what you’re saying brings to mind the importance of the particular human being for nondual realization.
There’s no nondual realization without it being of somebody, like Nisargadatta Maharaj or Ramana Maharshi or Dilgo Khyentse. Nisargadatta Maharaj was talking with a particular Indian guy, with a body who died of cancer, who sold tobacco, and got mad at his students. All of that. So, there is the individual, and the individual is necessary for the boundless to know itself. That is one thing.
You see, the many of the nondual teaching, they know of that, but they try to explain it. And every teaching has one way, one way of explaining it. Some of the Vedanta schools, for instance, the way they explain it is that, the individual is an illusion and ask, “What’s it all for?” They said, “Well, the Brahman or the ultimate consciousness creates an illusion for it to experience itself.” So, the individual is an illusion. And my response to that, usually, when I’ve talked to them of this illusion, “Why does something is so powerful, so endless, needs an illusion to know itself? Why doesn’t just create something real, truthful, just as it is, which is the human being?”
TS: If non-dual realization needs a being to know it, isn’t that—I mean, help me here, isn’t that being an experiencer?
AHA: No. Well, it happens in different degrees. And you can be the being knowing nondual love, nondual awareness. Or can be nondual awareness, knowing itself through the being.
TS: Aha.
AHA: I mean, the person who brought that point, clearly, is the Sufi, Ibn ‘Arabī. You probably heard of Ibn ‘Arabī, one of the greatest Sufis in the 13th century, and who brought in nonduality to the West. He called it, unity of being, Waḥdat al-wujūd. And what he said is that God needs the soul as much as the soul needs God. The soul need God to exist, but God needs the soul so that God knows God. There’s no way for God to know itself without a soul, and the soul is individual.
TS: I’m feeling very satisfied, at this moment, in terms of how we’ve come full circle. And I wonder here to end, one of the things that you and the Diamond Approach does so well is it gives people questions that they can inquire into deeper.
And I wonder here, as we come to the end of this conversation, we’ve stirred up this notion of knowing nondual love, in a nondual way, through the being that we each are. What might be some questions that people could reflect on in their own experience, that would help them deepen their own understanding here?
AHA: What do you experience as you listen here? What happens to you? Do you feel the fullness of love that is effulging? Filling the space with the wonderful of goodness and the light? If not, ask yourself why not? What’s in the way? What’s in the way of me experiencing the goodness of reality? There are many things in the way. Ask yourself, what’s in the way of me experiencing the goodness of reality that can come through me? Why isn’t it coming through me? Or why is it coming through me in such little way? Ask yourself, what is it?
Don’t shy away. Don’t be scared of the limitation, the anger or the hurt, or the humiliation you had. Embrace them. Feel them. Let them come and let them go. Let them evaporate so they won’t be barriers. But ask yourself, what’s in the way? What’s in the way of me knowing myself this way?
And another question we can ask one’s self, what do you experience yourself as? Do you experience yourself as a body, as somebody who has a body? If you are somebody who has a body, what is that somebody? Ask yourself that. What is you? And keep asking, what is you? What am I? That’s, of course, the usual question in many traditions, who am I? But I think, what am I is a good way, but I think easier for people is to ask, what limits me from experiencing the true openness and fullness of my heart? Start there.
What stopped me experiencing the openness and fullness of my own heart? Because the way I see it, the way I know it, it is a human right, a human nature to have that fullness of heart. It is our potential. We are born to be able to do that.
If it isn’t happening, why? Not to blame somebody, but to find what covers it? What limits it? Other people done all kinds of wrongs to you, hurt you, rejected you, didn’t love you, all of that. OK, recognize that. Find that. Feel the pain of it. Feel the hurt of it. Feel the anger about it, the hatred about it. Embrace all of those, because these are all some of the limitations. Welcome the limitation by asking yourself, what limits my experience of love?
What do you think, Tami? Are that good questions, or enough?
TS: Very good questions, and plenty. Hameed, I always learn so much from you. There was a section in Nondual Love where you wrote about how when two beings come together, the light can increase in those of us who are around the higher-vibration light. And you know, I feel it. I sense it. I know it, in our conversations, this increase in light.
AHA: I see.
TS: I can sense it.
AHA: The sweetness feeling, not just my room, but your room, too.
TS: It’s a gift.
AHA: I’m hoping, now, the people who are listening, begin to fill them and fill in their room.
TS: Exactly.
AHA: That’s the point of us doing this. We’re not doing it just for us, the two of us. We want other people to benefit.
TS: Nondual Love: Awakening to the Loving Nature of Reality, the new book by A.H. Almaas. Hameed, thank you for this chance to talk about it.
AHA: From love.
TS: And if you’d like to watch Insights at the Edge on video and participate in the after-show Q-and-A session with our guests, come join us on Sounds True One, a new membership community featuring award-winning original shows, live classes, community learning, guided meditations and more, with the leading wisdom teachers of our time. Use promo code PODCAST to get your first month free. You can learn more at Join.SoundsTrue.com. Sounds True, waking up the world.
