Welcome to part two of dialogue 12 with Ah Almas aka Hamid Ali in our ongoing Wisdom series.

Welcome to Deep Transformation Self, Society, Spirit, Life enhancing, Paradigm rattling conversations with cutting edge thinkers, contemplatives and activists with Dr. Roger Walsh and John Dupuis.

One of the amazing things about the book as it's self evident that you know these experiences, but the fact that you're able to language it at such a level, I think that has to be very unique.

That's part of what comes through you.

You could talk about these things that are almost incomprehensible but take us right to the edge where we begin to experience.

I mean it's really.

It's just phenomenal.

I think it has to do with the times.

The fact that this elaboration, this detailed telling of the experience is happening is because I don't think it was that possible before.

Our times have a lot to do with it.

Why wasn't it possible before?

It's not just me.

Well, there are a bunch of factors.

One of them, many of the teachers thought that those should not be spoken, so to speak.

It is not good for the student that will give the student idea that try to run after these things and that you can't do that.

So they thought it was like an antidote that I still some teacher I talk with, they don't want to talk in this detail.

They think it will prejudice their students.

I thought what do you mean prejudice your students?

Your student not learning as much as my students.

I am talking and because I am talking they are able to get it because it's so subtle, so unknown, somebody talking about it, you point to it, you say, oh, there's this possibility, this is such and such and such.

So they might try.

True people might try to go after it, but it won't work.

You still have to do the practices.

That is one thing when why it wasn't before.

And I think the culture is at the present time is a different.

There are a meeting of many teachings present and many teachings, dialogue between many teachings.

And our psychology has developed a developed language, philosophy developed developed language.

All of these have to be in place for this kind of communication, I think to happen.

Right place, right time.

Yeah, that's very important.

I happen to be the instrument for it.

You know, I happen to be straddle both world, the old world and the new world, the science and the non science.

So that gave me kind of capacity to do it.

My mind was honed that way so I can speak it.

And amid you mentioned something really so central and crucial, which is that these discussions are incredible and they're beautiful pointers.

And the goal is not understanding, or not only understanding, but realization, direct experience for ourselves.

And that kind of training to have these direct experiences is available through your diamond approach.

And you've systematically laid out a training program for people to have the kind of realizations that you're from which you've sourced the material and to which you're appointing us.

Yeah, the reason I talk about it is not just talk about it.

I want people to experience it.

I want people to share and experience.

Because it is the potential of all humanity.

All humans have this as their potential possibility.

And all teachings say that, of course, all teaching, they're trying their best to help others get to it, to get to this kind of realm.

That's wrong in many other realms.

But this is one of the fundamental realms of experience, of awakening or realization.

And in our discussion so far, centering around on pure presence, we've talked about the fullness of experience and the richness, the completeness that comes with that.

And you also emphasize that it's kind of like two sides here.

There's one way in which presence can be experienced is this fullness, completeness.

And another side, which isn't the opposite, even though it may sound like, is a kind of transparency or emptiness, nothingness to pure presence.

So perhaps you could speak to that side.

Yeah, you see?

And what I call the first turning, when we experience presence in a more localized, limited way.

Presence tend to arise in spaciousness, space, what I call inner space.

So there's always with the fullness, presence.

There is the other side, which is the emptiness of spaces, but appears more like empty space, like physical space, but it is an inner experience space, clean, clear, transparent, clear.

And usually the presence, whether it is the redness of strength or the brilliance of intelligence, or is the apricot of fulfillment, usually arises within the spaciousness scene.

And so seems like in the space.

Usually I think of it in the first training as one of the manifestation of being.

Let's say being can be love or peace, but can be just spaciousness, similar to space, empty, extended, infinite space.

But the two things appear as if two things, the two different aspects, two different manifestations of being.

There is the presence that appears within spaciousness.

Spaciousness is needed.

Like spaciousness is the clearing, clearing away the Persona, the ego, so that there is a possibility of presence to emerge in one quality or another.

In this dimension, the two things are inseparable.

The presence and the spaciousness are inseparable they are non dual, they are interpenetrating, they're inside each other.

So usually we first encounter the fullness.

We need to stay in the fullness for some time to recognize it is also nothing.

So being and nothing turn out to be two sides of the same thing.

But the spaciousness here appears a little different than the space that is distinct as pure spaciousness, within which arises forms of presence.

Here the spaciousness appears different.

The way I look at it, you know, I use mathematics here, the spaciousness and what I call the first turning.

Now we talk about the second turning, which I call in this teaching the part of the dimension of the second turning.

So this pure being is part of the second and first turning, which are the qualities of presence emerging in space.

The space they arise I called Euclidean, Euclidean space, meaning it is straight.

Straight lines go straight.

Euclidean mean flat, like two dimensional Euclidean.

Space is flat like a plane.

And then it become three dimensional, it's still flat, it is not curved like Einstein.

Space can be curved.

That means not Euclidean.

See, Euclidean is completely straight.

All lines are straight.

The space here is non Euclidean.

I call it Riemannian.

Riemann is another mathematician who developed non Euclidean geometry, where the shortest distance, the shortest line between two points is a curve, not a straight line.

Because the space itself curves just like Einstein's spaces.

It's called non Euclidean geometry.

So the space here is non Euclidean, it's not flat.

Hence it is difficult to give it dimensionality.

To give it how many dimensions?

What's the dimension?

So I call it nothing.

Instead of calling space, I call it nothingness.

It's a sense like being and nothing.

Being is fullness, nothingness is nothing.

There is the other side of it and there are two sides of the same thing.

Like they're inside each other.

They are like if you take presence, which is of course has no.

And if you could take source, let's say the presence that is in this room and take it at any point.

At this side here you'll notice at this side, the presence is also nothingness.

One side is present, one side nothing.

You come here, presence and nothingness.

You come here, presence and nothingness.

Here, presence, nothingness.

So the nothingness is completely wed to the beingness, to the fullness.

And the nothingness is amazing sense of freedom, lightness and kind of.

It is a purity.

So what we find in this dimension, the being and nothing are not separate.

There are two ways of knowing the same thing.

So I could feel it as a fullness, or we could feel this as an emptiness.

And the emptiness here I call it nothingness.

There are many kind of emptiness.

In this teaching I talk about space, Euclidean space.

Now I'm talking about non Euclidean space.

I call nothing.

There are other kinds we will talk later about.

See?

So the inner emptiness are many dimensions of it.

And this pure presence reveals one of the main dimension, which is the feeling of nothingness.

So you can feel fullness that has nothingness implicit in us.

Or the fullness can dominate.

You're not even aware of the nothingness or the nothingness can dominate.

So everything is nothing.

Everything is an expression of nothing.

And nothing is transparent, clear, colorless, pure and amid.

Would you say that different traditions emphasize different sides of that?

For example, I think of Vedanta or Hinduism as emphasizing the fullness and perhaps Buddhism as emphasizing the nothingness.

I think there is a truth to that.

When you listen to Vedanta or read their text, they're talking about Sat chitnanta.

Sat means being Sat.

None of those is emptiness.

Sat is being or truth.

Chit is consciousness and Ananda is joy or good feeling.

So all these are characteristic of true nature.

But none of them speaks about the emptiness.

It's not like they don't know about the emptiness.

It is not included in the name.

Buddhists make emptiness be central to their teaching, which we will talk about in one of the chapters, but not this one.

You get to talk about the empty, the Buddhist, what I call Buddhist emptiness.

You know, then nothingness now comes close to the Buddhist emptiness.

But it is not exactly what.

Because you know, if you for instance, listen to the Dalai Lama or any one of those, they talk, they define emptiness as the non existence of forms.

This nothingness is not the non existence.

It is the other side of existence.

It's the inner nature of existence.

It does not negate existence.

This nothingness, the Buddha's emptiness negates existence, which we'll get to at some point in another chapter.

Here we talk about the whole realm of being.

So too Vedanta, I think, than Buddhism here, closer to Pedanta, close to Master Eckhart or Ibn Arabi.

Those people who talk about being or existence, like Shabistari in his book the Garden of Secrets, I think it's called.

He talk about the ocean with no shores.

Being, he said an atom greater than the whole.

Another paradox.

Yeah, I love paradox.

I love those paradoxes.

It's a good ok, poetry.

And amid you are pointing to something.

So the infinite.

The infinite, the fullness, the completeness, the transparency of presence has this feeling of something Cosmic, vast, which it is boundless, of course, as you describe.

But then you beautifully bring it down to ordinary experience, pointing out that this recognition of pure presence, its fullness and emptiness or nothingness, has a strange familiarity.

And it's actually the familiarity, the recognition that this is actually the nature of our ordinary awareness.

Yeah, that's the thing, actually.

I remember having that experience at some point after learning about the being experiencing my ordinary experience.

And I'm aware of things.

And I'm saying, what is this awareness of things?

And I caught it.

The awareness is made out of the same thing.

It is pure being that is aware and it is the awareness.

So this is true.

We all have it.

We are all sort of familiar with it, but without recognizing it is an important point.

Because man, some of the teaching used that, of course, how you could follow your ordinary awareness to the fullness of pure awareness.

So the thing about pure being, it has awareness and knowing, it knows itself.

You know, it knows it is being.

It knows it is aware.

You know, it's not like just there with that cognition.

There's cognition.

And our ordinary awareness has cognition.

You see, that's why I say it is the same thing.

Because our ordinary awareness, we are aware of something and we are able to know what it is.

If we have been denying.

Like I'm aware of my, for instance, calmness, and I know it calmness.

I'm aware of the pain my knee, and I know it's a pain in the knee.

So there's awareness and knowing at the same time.

And that is true in pure being.

There's awareness and knowing at the same time.

So in nothingness, there's awareness.

Yes, nothingness that is inseparable from being is awareness.

It is the origin of ordinary awareness.

Put it this way.

Sometime I do guided meditation, which is how people say, well, pay attention to think, you know this.

And then I said, well, you're aware of these things, but you're paying attention to the capacity to be aware.

You're not paying attention to what it is that is aware.

What make you have that capacity?

What makes us have the capacity to be aware of some things?

Because we usually think of our always awareness of something.

When you ask anybody, they're not just aware, they're aware of something.

When they say I'm aware, I'm conscious, they mean they're conscious of something.

There are content to their experience.

They're aware of content.

The question what gives them the capacity to be aware of content?

That is the part that the theories of consciousness and science don't ask.

They're studying consciousness.

Seriously, some of them, I mean the universities, many departments studying consciousness.

But what they're studying is the capacity of Kanto, the functioning of awareness, which is perception.

They're studying how perception happens and not studying what gives us the capacity to perceive.

When I actually asked those cognitive scientists, they said, oh no, we don't study that, we just study.

He said, that's ontology.

That's not our field.

They're afraid of becoming.

How do you think it happened?

We don't study where.

What makes it happen.

You're pointing to something that you emphasize in the chapter Hamid, which seems really striking, and that is that we tend to assume that awareness is simply a function or a process of knowing something.

But yet you say no, it's also an ontological.

You quote.

It is also an ontological reality.

Yeah, it is an.

Isn't it?

Awareness is something that we could recognize awareness for what it is.

We can recognize the medium of awareness.

We can recognize the medium of self knowing awareness.

The medium of awareness that perceives and knows what it perceives.

You see Dzogchen awareness, although they say non conceptual, it has knowing in it because it knows it is awareness.

And so, and in fact Yeshay has knowing.

They talk about, you know, Rigba as knowing consciousness.

It's both knowing at the same time.

So the Zouchen perspective of what awareness is, it includes knowing.

They don't talk about that way.

I talk about that, but it always includes knowing.

So it is closer to our ordinary awareness, because our ordinary awareness has capacity to know.

So gives us the perceptivity, but also give us the cognitive capacity.

And that comes from this dimension of pure presence because it has both the perceptivity, the sensitivity and the cognitive dimension.

So is this knowingness, is that conceptual?

Is that a concept?

That's a big question.

It will take an hour to discuss.

Leave that till next time in detail.

But in some sense, yes, in some sense no, because the question comes not so simple.

Most people say conceptual and they leave it at that.

But it is really much more intricate and deep than that.

So we need to get.

It takes us time to decipher this.

The important thing here is that there is no cognition and perception at the same time.

There is awareness and knowing that are inseparable from each other.

And that is a characteristic of pure presence.

Pure presence, you know, presence by being.

Presence, being and knowing are not two things, you see.

So being being is the same thing as knowing being.

So you know that is true about presence, even from the first turning.

When we know love.

How do we know love?

By feeling love, by knowing, by experiencing love.

The experience and the knowing are inseparable.

The beingness, the presence of it and the knowingness of love are not two things.

So love includes knowing of love.

And so is compassion.

So is contentment, so is peace.

When you talk about peace, people say it's non conceptual.

Well, yeah, in some sense.

But it has knowing.

Does knowing mean conceptual?

Here is not what most people call conceptual.

Most people call conceptual.

They mean mental elaboration, you know, and we'll get into that.

But the thing here is that the cognitive dimension and the being dimension are two sides of the same thing.

And that becomes clear in this dimension of realization, of pure presence.

So this is not anti intellectual, it's.

Not anti concepts, it's not anti cognition.

No, because there is cognition in knows itself.

I mean, if you don't know itself, you call what Gurdjieff called a stupid saint.

You are, but you don't know what you are.

Here you are and you know what you are.

You know it, know it fully, you know it completely.

The knowing and the being are so intertwined.

They are, cannot be separate.

They are co emergent.

I mean, we will discuss it next time about knowing.

But the important thing here we're getting into is that the being of presence includes the knowing of presence.

In fact, that's what's called gnosis.

What is gnosis?

Knowing by being.

Right.

That's what gnosis mean.

Noises in the Greek.

What do they mean by.

Why did they say gnosis instead of knowing?

Because it is known by being, not known by observing.

Yeah.

And in contemporary philosophy or even psychology, it would be described as the distinction between knowing by description and knowing by acquaintance.

Yeah, it will be like by acquaintance, but it is the intimate acquaintance, not just acquaintance.

It's complete unity with it.

Ah, yes.

Okay.

You know more.

That is the absolute limit of acquaintance.

Yeah, yeah.

No one to be acquainted.

Yeah, yeah.

Because acquainted means there's somebody acquainted with something.

While here.

No, they're not two it is just the being itself knowing itself by being itself.

Being itself and knowing itself is the same thing.

And amid.

You point to some of the implications of this recognition and the recognition that the magnificence of presence in all its fullness and nothingness is our own awareness.

You say, and I quote, that this recognition is an explosive insight and a momentous awakening.

Yeah.

That is what most people call awakening.

Awakening is a recognition of what our being is or what our awareness is.

Knowing awareness is being.

And being is awareness.

And knowing it for what it is.

Knowing that the fullness and the emptiness, the two sides of the same thing.

It's paradoxical.

When you bring nothingness and fullness together, it's paradoxical, but many philosophers have dealt with this paradox and being a nothing, you know.

But here, being and nothing are not two sides or not two things.

They are implicit in each other.

And it is sort of a mystery, actually, when you think about it.

It's not logical.

The mind can't make.

How can that be?

Nothing is nothing in fullness and fullness.

How can fullness and be nothing?

But experientially, it is the case that you find that what you know directly is through noises, direct knowing, what I call immediate knowing.

Knowing through immediacy.

That's in other terms, instead of acquaintance, I call it immediacy.

Knowing through immediacy, the immediacy of knowing.

Not by, you know, observing at a distance.

Immediacy by being in the middle of the experience, by being the experience, being the consciousness and the quality of the experience.

So being and knowing, that's an important thing that we could come out of this.

Being and knowing are the same thing here.

Being knows itself because being has a cognitive quality to us.

So what shows that knowing and mind are fundamental and not just intellectual?

This is not intellectual knowing.

It's called noises.

But still, I mean, noises is knowing, but there's not the knowing that psychologists or philosophers or scientists know.

It's not knowing a fact.

It's knowing of oneself, not a concept.

It's an experience.

You said before, it is experience, but it is an experience that has discrimination.

It has knowingness.

And it's a very clear, precise knowing without knowing being intellectual, not in the mind.

The being doesn't emerge from the mind emerges from the being itself.

And the mind emerges from being.

It is a different kind of knowing.

Most people don't know this God being even if they have it.

Sometimes they don't know they're having it.

I think human beings tend to have that knowing because it is natural to us.

For most people are so dominated by their thinking mind, they don't recognize that there is a knowing that is implicit, you know, that is natural, essential.

It is awakening.

When you know this knowing, you're awakened, you're realized, you're enlightened.

And you point out, Hamid, that when there is this recognition of our ordinary awareness as being what it really is, then there's a profound kind of energizing or alertness or it becomes awakened awareness.

It Becomes alive, lucid, cleared, just takes on a much more awake, alive quality to it.

Yeah.

We realize that our awareness is everywhere, too.

Awareness that seemed to fill our body, our mind, when we recognize what it is, where this cognitive or perceptual capacity come from when we wake up to that.

What you mean we recognize when the awareness looks at itself as.

Oh, that's what I am.

Transparent clarity.

The moment you see that, you see it is really the nature of everything that becomes awakening.

So awakening is always like that.

You awaken to the nature of reality, not just to your nature.

And you also emphasize, Hamid, that along with this comes the recognition that, oh, I've always.

Awareness has always been present.

I actually was not awakening, was not lost.

It simply wasn't recognized.

Yeah, it's more like awareness was always there, but I haven't awakened to what it is.

Yeah.

I haven't seen what it is.

You know, like, awareness is there, but it's covered over by what we call sleep.

And here you're drawing very close analogies to what you mentioned before.

And maybe we should clarify the terms for people you.

This is perhaps you're describing now the heart of the recognition or awakening of Dzogchen, which is often described as the highest form of Tibetan Buddhism.

And you use the term before rigpa, which is the term given to the pure awareness, the recognition of the awakened awareness.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, the rigpa they talk about as the true nature, you know, of awareness, but it's implicit in it.

It knows itself.

It might not emphasize that part, but it's implicit in the way they talk.

Because they don't say you're just aware of it.

You know it for what it is.

And, Hamid, I have one more question.

I'll stop asking all my questions.

You said that this realization, this awakening, cannot be earned.

Yeah.

That's.

Wow.

And that sometimes practice just reinforce or reifies the sense of separate self.

Exactly.

Well, you can't be earned because you're already that.

There's that.

And already that you just awaken to it.

That's the idea that you're already.

That you don't earn it.

It is you.

It is what you are.

It's your being, your true being, your true awareness.

And you just wake up to the fact, oh, I am this.

I'm not just the body.

I am something that makes the body aware.

And one of your current emphases, Amit, is that awakening is a recognition.

Yeah, yeah.

Awakening is a recognition.

Yeah.

Or remembering, possibly.

Yeah.

Sometime called remembering.

Yeah.

Remembering meaning.

Because usually we say we forget basically mean we not recognizing the nature of our awareness.

And so remembering is basically like looking at the capacity and seeing where it comes from.

It's not easy for most people.

They can't just look back.

You know, some teachers talk, okay, just look back and you'll see it's not that easy.

You probably know that.

You can't just know that.

Well, people prices for years before they could do that.

And it's true, it is.

You just look back and know what it is.

But there's so many things in the way, you see, that brings us to the obstacles against this realization.

There are many obstacles and many layers in the mind that make us not see the purity of our perceptual ground.

There also seems to be a.

It's kind of recurrent.

Once you say there's a guidance, you felt like you were being guided on this whole experience of awakening in all these dimensions.

So there's some kind of unearned, to use a Christian term, grace that facilitates us being able to remember who and what we are.

Yes, in my experience, there was guidance for me.

Doesn't mean everybody will experience guidance.

You know, in my experience, I happen to have guidance.

And all throughout, not just for this, throughout the whole journey.

It's guided in the sense it does it itself.

My practice is clearing the way for it to emerge.

I think practice doesn't make it happen.

But we can work on ourselves, but we can't make it happen.

Yeah, yeah.

And the practice of basically clearing the way, whether it emerges or not is not up to you.

Thank God.

Nice saying in Zen that enlightenment is an accident, but meditation makes you accident prone.

Yeah, that's a good way of saying it.

Yeah.

Amit, let me ask a question here.

We're a bit past the hour as you.

You raised the question of whether we should try to get through all the chapter.

There are a couple of significant things still left in the chapter, like reification and working through reifications for inquiry.

I'm wondering if we should leave that for another.

Yeah.

And that.

That will.

I think we'll leave for next time because we need to know about knowing what knowing means and different levels of knowing of that to know about revocation.

Well, another incredible dialogue, Hamid.

So we're having fun with this and that's the point.

We need to continue having fun.

I like it that you're engaged because that makes me get engaged.

You know, if you are engaged, I won't be interested.

Oh, no, we are super engaged.

We text each other.

That brings a doubt in Me, you see my being respond to your interest.

That's it.

That's it.

Always the case.

My being responds to when it is called the response.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, it's beautiful.

Yeah.

Well, thank you.

Being.

Yeah, thank you.

What a gift.

What a gift to all the listeners.

Yeah, yeah.

We're all being.

Yep.

Including our TV screen is being.

Everything being.

Remember about the oneness.

Yeah, everything.

Yeah.

Part of my practice now, in Dzogchen practice, or Ma Mudra practice, actually at this stage, is just trying to sustain the recognition of everything.

The term that's being used there is radiance.

Everything is radiance.

Yeah, that's one way of saying it.

One of the way I've been writing a poem about and why I was saying is that peeing peers through all.

Yeah, beautiful.

And I was talking to Roger during the break.

I said, this transmission, this teaching, it's very, very affirming.

It's deeply affirming, though.

Existence affirming.

That real.

Yeah.

It affirms to you that you're real.

You have real being and you are an expression of the being of God.

That's a beautiful place to wrap it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So we'll continue with this question being and take it to its cognitive side.

Explore the cognitive side more completely next time because that will take us to what are some of the obstacles, you know, and how we understand mind.

And all because people don't understand mind yet where mind come from.

No shortage of topics.

No.

Hamid, thank you so, so much.

We're so grateful to be here with you.

And it's been just a great journey with us.

And I would have never studied this book like I have, unless we're going to have these conversations.

But I just have to keep immersing.

And I have all these things underlined from the first two times.

I said, maybe I'll just read what's underlined.

And then I go, oh, I need to underline what I didn't underline the first two times.

It's just like, well, hopefully this immersion will help our listeners immerse themselves in studying the book because they have all these reflection, all these discussion to help them, you know, immerse themselves in each chapter.

Because truly they're not easy thing to penetrate those chapters, you know.

Yeah.

And I also, I realized I would like to emphasize more the opportunity of, you know, encouraging people to go through the program and in addition to the listening and the reading, so whatever way.

They can do it, of course, because there are.

Yes, there are practices, there are teaching, there are guidance There are teachers and this school, but many other schools have teaching, you know, and they do it a different way.

But if you want to learn it this way, this all does it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, Ned, ah, it's a gift.

Good seeing you guys.

You know, I've been away.

In fact, it seems like it's been forever.

I've been gone.

It feels like I've been gone for five years.

Was only five weeks.

Well, sounds like it was a rich and full time, so that's wonderful.

It was.

Yeah.

As now.

As now.

Yes.

Rich with being.

Rich with being now.

Rich with being.

Not with events.

With being.

Yes.

Let it always be so.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Wonderful.

See you next time.

Yeah.

Thanks so much.

Yeah.

Thank you very much for being a part of this conversation.

We hope that you were moved as we are moved in part.

Part of it ourselves.

We'd also like to say that this is being funded by Roger and myself.

It comes out of our pockets.

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So we've done that a couple of ways.

But we'd like you to buy us a cup of coffee.

Very simple.

And I do that with podcasts that I support it and I found it very satisfying.

So thank you for your help.

Thank you for your presence and thank you for all you are and all you do.

We love you.

Sam.