A.H. ALMAAS – FROM HIS WRITINGS

A- Source – The Void: Inner Spaciousness and Ego Structure:

· Psychological space or emptiness is a requirement, a first step toward the unfolding of personal essence.

· The structuralization of self-image, as well as other childhood experience, leads to the loss of space as part of our experience. Along with this loss of space, essence in its various aspects is lost. Self-image ends up excluding emptiness and the fullness of essence as possible categories of experience.

· Inner change must involve a change in self-image. Otherwise the change is either temporary or it is no change at all, hidden behind a new form of the old. For example, a person who has a self-image of being weak will not feel strong or behave in a strong way unless the self-image of weakness is either changed or eliminated. For this person to allow strength, some of his psychic boundaries will have to be changed or dissolved.

· Thus we see the role of space in inner change: there is no lasting change without a change of self-image, there is no change in self-image without a dissolution of self-boundaries, and there is no dissolution of boundaries without the action of space. Space, or emptiness, makes possible the ending of the old and the allowing of the new. It is the room vacated by the old which is needed for the new to manifest. There can be no change if the old continues. Change is the death of the old and the coming to life of the new. This is true at all levels of psychological or spiritual change. Changes in self-image always involve the emptiness – space process: the small changes are those seen as psychological, the deeper changes are those seen as spiritual.

· The unfoldment of essence in individuals possessing integrated and stable personality structures is a slow process of “peeling”, done in a balanced and quiet manner. The various self-images are exposed first. Thru awareness they then become ego-alien. Then the person lets go of them by understanding their psychodynamics. This leads to emptiness and then to Being.

Now, as our true identity is Being, if we take ourselves to be a certain image it means we are ignorant (lack of knowledge or understanding) about our true nature. In fact, much of the personality consists of wrong ideas and beliefs about what one is, plus the emotional affects associated with them. This context clouds the clarity of the mind space, dulling and darkening it, and is seen as “deficient space”. When this deficient space is actually seen for what it is (a filter of ignorance composed of images from the past taken to define oneself, accompanied by wrong beliefs and emotions associated with the images), it transforms into space as soon as the wrong beliefs and their accompanying emotions are seen and understood. As the deficient emptiness becomes clearer and more precise, the deficient emptiness slowly and gradually lights up, lightens up, and becomes clearer and more spacious.

· Because of our self-image representations, our experience of ourselves is not objective – we experience ourselves thru all the representations of ourselves.

· If our mind is experiencing things thru representations, our mind is closed and fixed. When the representations dissolve, there is literally openness, lightness and emptiness – space – in the mind.

B- Source: The Pearl Beyond Price: Integration of Personality into Being: An Object Relations Approach:

· Understanding that ego is a reflection, or an imitation, of a true reality [essence/Being] makes it possible to connect to the reality. One may not need to go the usual spiritual route of abandoning one’s personal life and the values of that life, but rather one must look deeply into those values and explore the true reality of which they are approximating. Most people are not willing to abandon their personal life for a spiritual quest, not merely because of attachment to ego, but because they sense a truth in the values and aspirations of personal life. For such people, understanding the reality underneath ego is a more accessible means of spiritual development than the traditional methods, striving after impersonal reality. This is not only because in this method they do not have to abandon their personal lives and aspirations, but also because this path reveals the deeper values and truths of those aspirations and strivings toward actualization

[Almaas shows how an ego is developed from infancy upwards thru ‘self-object relations’ – each encounter with ‘other’ is part of an incremental learning process, as one ‘builds’ one’s ego into, basically, a survival vehicle. In so doing, however one develops a number of earlier needed survival characteristics and attitudes which limit one’s later development. When one can develop a path of insight into these no longer needed, but nevertheless limiting ego structures, one can ‘metabolise’ aspects of the ego into essence (Being), and live more spontaneously and freely. Contrary to many teachers, Almaas instructs us to value our ego – after all it helped us survive to this point – but to also attain insight into its limiting structures so as to metabolise/transcend the limitations of experience.]

· The life of ego is the childhood of humanity, and the life of Being is its maturity - - - but since spiritual development beyond or instead of the ego level is very rare, we can see that it is not simply a naturally occurring continuation of ego development. - - - A possible factor that allows the mature ego to more closely approach the qualities of Being is that the ego becomes less defensive as it grows and develops, acquiring more flexibility, pliability and hence openness to essential perceptions.

· Personal Essence (Being) is the ultimate product of ego development. Ego development and spiritual enlightenment are not two disjointed processes but parts of the same process [a continuum].

· Depending on the situation in childhood one can grow to be completely identified with the self-image, or the identification can be loose and relaxed due to frequent and prolonged experiences of the Personal Essence. This experience becomes internalized, and influences one’s personality. The Personal Essence is the real person, and thru ego development this goal is realized…This evolution is the process of the personalization of Being. It is how Being, impersonal and eternal, becomes a person, a human being on earth. So the process is a matter of Being, which is spirit, learning to live in a physical embodiment.

· An important difference between the mind and Being is the mind can absorb and identify with any psychic material it believes to be true. It does not have the capacity, on its own, to discern what is objective truth and what is not. The mind can be deceived, even by itself.

· Spiritual purification has nothing to do with morality but involves separating the true from the fake. Since development is constituted by the metabolism of personal experience, and for this metabolism to be complete the true must be separated from the false – the former to be absorbed and the latter to be discarded – we can see that the specific requirement of growth, maturation and development is truth garnered from personal experience.

…In general, the process of eliminating falsehood is spontaneous; the mind generally lets go of an impression when it recognizes it to be false. Since it can no longer be used for purposes of identification, and cannot be absorbed, the false impression simply dissolves. An exception to this pattern is when a clearly false belief is part of a larger system, most likely unconscious, which the mind still takes to be true; then the mind will hold onto the falsehood until the larger belief system is revealed.

The permanent presence of identification systems in the mind can now be seen as a kind of indigestion or constipation. Any such system is a mental contraction, which is accompanied by physical contractions in the body. When the inner sensitivity is refined, the tensions in the body which accompany identification can be seen. These tensions are what Wilhelm Reich called “body armour”; he further recognized that any character structure has a defensive pattern, which he called “character armour” which was revealed in the tension patterns of the body armour. Identifying these tension patterns can be very useful in the process of becoming aware of one’s identifications.

· A capacity of Being is that of empathy, and when this is developed, one does not just vaguely sense the emotional state of the other person, but one is clearly conscious of the exact inner state of the other. One knows what the other feels, where in the body the feelings are, what tension patterns accompany this state, how the other is interpreting this state, and even what is underneath the state in the unconscious.

[If one’s ego is inadequately developed, this same “empathy” aspect results in ‘negative merging’ – wherein one becomes so resonant with the other’s emotional states that they cannot tell their own feelings from those of the other, and one becomes subject to the other’s emotional/psychic disturbance. This ‘shadow’ side of empathy – one’s loss of necessary discrete individuality – occurs

1. when one is ‘open’ without a well developed ego foundation; or

2. when one has been ‘hypnotized’ by another, or by their own belief systems or by the belief memes of their environment.]

[Almaas reminds us that Being is an outgrowth of ego. A well-developed ego can mature/develop into Being. Essential in this process is for ego inadequacies to be recognized and ‘healed’ and be truly empathetic in the insight/metabolic process as ego becomes grounded into Being.]

· To move thru the ego-to-essence (Being) development process, Will in the service and support of objective Truth is essential. Living the life of Truth [especially self-truth] is the true meaning of inner discipline. This discipline is not that which is under the control of the super-ego, nor according to someone else’s idea of discipline. Living the life of truth is very personal, and depends on the particular person and his/her situation in life. One has to find one’s own way, one’s own application of objective Truth in one’s life – and this is the real support and protection of Essence and its development. The state itself will not manifest if one lives according to lies and delusions, and ego inadequacies will remain unresolved.

· There is no localization of consciousness in the body. The body is completely in unity with the rest of physical reality. All of physical reality is experienced as a unified whole, which is inseparable from Pure Being, that is the ground, essence and substance of all existence.

· The human being comes from Being, ultimately goes to Being, and is the embodiment of Being, as an indispensable cell in the eternal one-ness of Being.

A. H. Almaas is the pen-name of A. Hameed Ali who was born in Kuwait in 1944. At the age of eighteen, he moved to the USA to study at the University of California in Berkeley. He was working on his Ph.D. in physics when he reached a turning point in his life and destiny that led him more and more into inquiring into the psychological and spiritual aspects of human nature. After studying Sufi and Zen thought, including the works of Indries Shah, Georges Gurdjieff, Tarthang Tulka Rinpoche and D. T. Suszuki, Almaas developed the Diamond Approach which is a path of wisdom, an approach to the investigation of Reality and work on oneself that leads to human maturity and liberation. He now has centres and teachers in many countries worldwide, and his website at http://www.ahalmaas.com contains a glossary and several informative articles and interviews explaining his syncretic teachings.

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