Confront Yourself

“There is no way around confronting yourself, your unconscious, your fears, your doubts. I myself haven’t found any magical way around this. We each have to confront ourselves. We cannot simply practice a spiritual technique like meditation or prayer, have some deep experience, and expect it to totally transform us. The experience, regardless of how profound, simply cannot erase all the false influences on your consciousness. If we thoroughly investigate the matter for ourselves, we see that we have to confront ourselves in very powerful and deep ways.”

“What makes it so difficult for us as human beings to be deeply authentic and spontaneous, to feel free to be who we naturally are? One aspect of the answer lies in what most spiritual traditions understand to be a case of mistaken identity. Most of us are consciously and unconsciously identified with self-concepts which greatly limit our experience of ourselves and the world. Who we take ourselves to be, as determined by the sets of ideas and images that define us, is very far from the unconditioned reality that deeply realized human beings have come to recognize as our true nature, who we truly are.”

“Being real is not easy; it comes at a price. We cannot live a real life without taking risks, suffering difficulties, and making the necessary sacrifices. There’s no easy way. We call our path the Work because we often have to do things that are difficult. Although sometimes our Work might feel like play, and playful exploration is fundamental to it, more frequently it feels challenging. The inner journey is difficult because we have to deal with issues that we’d rather not deal with, issues that we’ve avoided for a long time. To be real, to live a truthful life, we have to be ruthlessly honest with ourselves. We can’t say, “I want to be real,” and keep running away from ourselves and from our lives. Being real is the result of confronting ourselves, the result of being honest about who and what we are. The help we get from our teachers is secondary to our own honesty and sincerity, is secondary to our own committed practice. We are transformed by our own risk, our own sacrifice. If we want to be real human beings, we have to live like real human beings, regardless of how difficult that may be.

Nobody can give you the gift of being a real human being. If you want a real life, a life with truth and integrity, a life with true meaning, with true significance, you’re going to have to live that way. A real life is not the result of the Work but is the Work. We have to take the risks, make the sacrifices, and confront our demons. If we devote our life to security, pleasure, and satisfaction, we won’t be real adult human beings. We will continue being little kids. If we don’t confront the difficulties in our life and our reality, we’re not going to live a real life. It’s as simple as that. We’re not going to become real by having certain experiences. The experiences might give us some direction and guidance, a taste of what is real, but true transformation happens when we learn to live according to the truth.”

“People who are near death sometimes begin to see how much they love life, how much they love the world, how much they love very simple things. To be able to get up and take a shower is wonderful. You don’t want to lose that . . . just feeling the water running over your body. Normally, you don’t tend to notice that; you just take a shower every morning and put on your clothes and run. But when you are about to die, you think, “Oh, am I never going to have a shower again?” and you recognize how much you like it, how much you love it. If we explore our relationship to the world, we recognize that we have a tremendous love for it.

We have a deep love for the world even though many of us have difficulty with it. We have fears and conflicts about the world, and there is much suffering, pain, aggression, and disappointment. Some of us sometimes hate the world. But when we explore very deeply, we usually recognize that we feel love for it as well.

At the same time, we have another love. Many people in the world are not aware of this other love. They are only living out their love, their attraction to, and their need for the world. But when somebody becomes more mature or sensitive, the conventional world is no longer enough.

The life of the world, regardless of how much we love it, feels incomplete at some point. Every aspect of it, regardless of how beautiful, how wonderful, it is, has something about it that is not completely satisfying. Even with people we love, in our intimate love relationships, and in our connection with nature, we hunger for something else, something more invisible. We can’t even define at first what that is. We become aware of this love in different ways. Some of us feel discontented, incomplete, or we become aware of a sense of meaninglessness. Some of us have a lot of pain and suffering and want to end that; so we seek happiness or freedom. That is why many spiritual teachings see as the motivation for enlightenment and spirituality the need to develop compassion, or to free people from suffering, or to have love for God or for truth. But if we explore all of these, we begin to recognize this other love, the love for what is beyond this world. Anyone who becomes interested in inner work, spiritual work, starts to be aware of this love.”

~ A.H. Almaas (1944 — ) is the pen name of A. Hameed Ali, an author and spiritual teacher who writes about and teaches an approach to spiritual development informed by modern psychology and therapy which he calls the Diamond Approach. Almaas is originally from Kuwait. He is the spiritual head of the Ridhwan School. He may be described, among other things, as an Integral theorist, mystic, spiritual teacher or an exponent of the perennial philosophy.

~ The Diamond Approach is derived from the experiences of Almaas, along with Karen Johnson and Faisal Muqaddam (who split off early on to develop his own approach). They were among the first students of Claudio Naranjo, an early pioneer of the integration of spiritual and therapeutic work.