Welcome to part one of the first dialogue in our Path of Love series with sage and spiritual guide A. H. Almaas, AKA Hameed Ali. In this conversation we review the arc of Hameed's three books in his Love Trilogy from a 30,000 foot overview to give us the lay of the land in the journey of the heart. In subsequent conversations we will focus on his newest book, the Inner Beloved, hot off the press and it is awesome. Welcome to Deep transformation, Self Society, Spiritual spirit, life enhancing, paradigm rattling conversations with cutting edge thinkers, contemplatives and activists with Dr. Roger Walsh and John Dupuy.

I'm Roger Walsh and our co host is John Dupuy. And our guest today is Hameed Ali, pen name A. H. Almaas. And we've been privileged to explore with Hameed the central text of his work which is the Inner Journey Home. And that forms the basis or provides an outline of the soul's journey from the earliest egoic challenges all the way through to degrees of realization and self transcendence and then return back into the world. It's really truly an extraordinary work. Laying out the spiritual path in its fullness with a degree of integration of psychological and spiritual dimensions. Drawing in part on cross cultural enrichments, but centered and inspired by Hameed's direct experience. But today we begin with something new and that is we are beginning an exploration of Hameed's most recent book, the Inner Beloved, which is being released as this broadcast is being broadcast. In this book, Hameed culminates a trilogy of books on love. The first book is Love Unveiled, the second is Non Dual Love. And these build up to the culmination in the current book the Inner Beloved. And John and I have been diving into this recent book as we have, we really became clear that we really needed to do an overview of the whole trilogy that while the Inner Beloved stands by itself as a remarkable text of the far the reaches of human potential and of love, it also is situated in and culminates the earlier books. And so it really felt like to do justice to the Inner Beloved, we also needed to ask Hameed to give us the larger picture, the complete vision that inspired and animates the trilogy as a whole. So we're going to do that. But I also want to just add a personal note and that is John and me as we've dived into this work on love, which perhaps we've been, and we've been calling the dialogues with Hameed the A. H. Almaas Wisdom series. But perhaps we should call these interviews the A. H. Love series. Well, we'll see. But, but as we've dived into this work we have. Maybe I should speak for myself, but I. I think I'm echoing John here. We have experienced a remarkable sense of excitement and wonder and awe and some overwhelm as we realize the vastness and depth of the vision that's being presented here and the challenge of us to open deeply enough to do justice to it. So whatever justice we can do to it, it's really been an extraordinary privilege to engage with this trilogy and to let it work on us and in us and hopefully transform us, at least in part, and open to the enormity and profundity of the vision it offers. So that's the context for this dialogue and our subsequent ones with Hameed on this. So, Hameed, maybe we could. You're welcome to begin where you'd like, but perhaps you'd like to give us the vision that inspired this whole trilogy.

Well, I'll put it in context of all of my books. First of all, usually I don't put out books just because I want to write about something. I put out books from the teaching that I approach that are contribution to spiritual literature. I put out books about topics that I don't find in the literature. So the Inner Journey Home is one of them for. So the detail is. No, I don't know when you have books, how much detail to those topics. But the other books I put in, you know, like the Point of Existence, the Pearl Beyond Price, these, you don't find. These topics you don't find really and detailed any. So I was. I was filling in literature. I wasn't trying to put out that approach as much as filling in gaps in the literature. So now I was doing that. At some point, some people start looking at the books I was writing, especially the one that are more technical, like the Point book and the Pearl Beam, Price and the Void, because they are more scholarly and reference as more heady, more intellectual. And I realized, well, they're missing the important element in this teaching, which is the role of love. So that's when I said, well, I better do something about love. I didn't want to do at the beginning something about love, because many people write about love. I didn't think that the spiritual field needed more about love. So. But I realized I need to complete the story of the diamond approach of this teaching by showing the role of love, which of course turns out to be is a contribution. Because I'm bringing things about love and the role of love and the path of love in ways that are not. That are different from other teachings. Many Teachings are right about love. I mean, the whole Sufi path is all about Bala, for instance. So these three books are basically I took them the way I will use the teaching. First talk about love. What is love? What is the experience of love? And Ferris book Love and Welsh gives the experience of love, the understanding of love, how to liberate love to the openness of the heart by giving different qualities of love. Love is not just one thing. There are many qualities of love that hooks again with what we studying in the energy neuron, what we call the aspects and qualities. There are many qualities of true nature or presence. And some of these qualities are qualities of the heart. And love is the main thing. Art has other qualities like fulfillment and satisfaction and joy. But love is the main thing about the heart. So the first book gives a sense what is the presence of love is like not the emotional love, but the spiritual love, how it is a presence. And it gives the whole phenomenology of it. Both the phenomenology, what it's feeling like, the texture and the taste. And then the flavor and the sensation, visual and the whole synesthetic experience of it. And also the particle barriers to each one of them. And I talk about three kinds of love there that are very important in human life and important in spiritual practice. One of them appreciative love, which is the appreciation, the liking of something or somebody. Which is the most common form of love. The other love that's called merging. The love merging gold, which is a golden sense of wanting to be one or something. That is the. The sense of melting and dissolving into what we love. And the third one is the passionate ecstatic love I call the pomegranate love, which is zesty, passionate, powerful, overwhelming kind of love. So that's the first volume. Second volume I go into what I call universal love in a book called Divine Love. Which is one of the bond dimension we've been studying in our other study. Which is love not as an individual something that we experience in our heart, but as pervading the honey ocean without shores. That is one way of experiencing non duality actually as a non duality of love. That everything is in love, everything is made out of love. And that's a whole dimension. And I go through all them ways of experiencing the obstacles to it and ways of realizing it. So the first two books is about love itself. What's it like, what the free experience is, what the limitations are that make it not experience, how the heart opens, all of that. And my third book is this present One is about the path of love. What does love do in relation to spiritual search, to realization, Enlightenment, which is the inner beloved. Which is the love is the movement toward our fundamental nature. But through the heart. And through the heart that comes in at the inner beloved. The beloved of the heart. The only and true beloved of the heart. I conceived the idea of these three volumes. And I remember at the time I wanted somebody to write an intro or something. And who could write something about love. So the only one I could think of at that time was Ram Dass, because he teaches about love. So I talked to him and he liked the idea. And he wrote in a preface or anthropo for the series, which I'm greatly for. So now this third volume got edited two years ago. It's coming out at any time. And that, as I said, is the path of the heart. The path of love. What's called the Bhakti approach, which is inherent in the Dharma approach. Because Darren approach is the main motivation in loving truth for its own sake. And what is truth? Truth, we don't mean just any truth. We mean the deepest truth. But first we have to know truth. Any old levels to get to the most fundamental. So this book details the journey itself, goes through the stages of it, which, you know, it's not the first time we've done that. Somebody wrote about the journey of the heart we wrote about. But not in the way I'm doing it. Not in the various stages, how one comes after the other. What are the obstacle, the issues and the difficulties in each stage. And what happened to the heart and what happened to the experience. And what is that in our beloved, after all, you know, which is not revealed towards the latter part of the book.

And I mean your understanding of love or the vision of love that you present here. Is very different from not only our cultural understanding of love as some emotion. But even from most spiritual understandings of love is kind of the goal or dissolving into becoming. Not even becoming one with, but being intimate with. Love is often presented as an endpoint. And you go far beyond that. So maybe you could say something about the very nature of love and its function.

The second volume talks about what you're mentioning, which is dissolve into love, which is the dimension of love, which is. Which is our spiritual nature as medad of love. And some teaching. That's what spiritual nature is. It's just pure love. Everything is love and it is true. Except our true nature has more dimension to it and more subtlety to it than just love. Love is One of its main manifestation. So those teachings are not wrong, they're just not managing. The other things you see that I get into, which is that the beloved is not just love. Love serves the beloved. Love is the way to the beloved. The beloved is the deepest non dual truth we can experience. Because that's another thing we hear that these books show, especially this book, that when we talk about a non devil truth, we don't mean one level, but there are dimensions of it, manifestation of it. So love is one of them. That's why I call the book non dual love. Because that experience of love. Experience is non dual. Nothing is separate from anything else. The subject and object are not separate. Here is not the movement of the heart. Though the bhakti is not our love. Love is the energy. Love is a driving force toward union with the inner nature which through the heart is experienced as a beloved of the heart.

You know, you also say that we can talk about these ideas of non being and being being part of the same thing. But that our mind has absolutely no clue actually what we're saying. And it is only the heart that can truly understand or truly experience the mind can get us so far. And you said the totally expanded mind gets us right to the edge. But when it comes down to it, to connect with that, with the inner beloved, with the source, it has to happen at a deeper level. Has to happen through the heart or in the heart.

That's true. So I'm talking here about the deepest non dual dimension, which is the beloved. The Neville's nondevil dimension can appear in other ways, other teachings. We use it without using the bhakti approach or the way of the heart. They could use the way of the mind, different ways of approaching it and experiencing it, meditation, things like that. But in the path of love, the path of heart, it appears in a different way. It appears as it appears in the heart, within the heart, through the heart and floods the universe through the heart. Instead of just appearing in the mind or appearing in consciousness, specifically heart experience, which shows more possibilities of it shows more of its typology, more of its qualities, more of its mystery and more of its exquisiteness. Because it's seen through the eyes of love like it's a beloved. Then, you know, when you love somebody, you know, you see them as beautiful, you see them as wonderful. Same thing here. The beloved is seen through the eyes of love. Not through the eye of consciousness or mind or anything like that, but through the heart. Because that's one thing here to pay attention to, to Recognize that the human soul, the human being, has several centers of operation. The head center, the heart center, the belly center. And each one of them is like a brain, a spiritual brain on its own, with its own mode of experience and operation. And the heart is like its own brain. The heart actually in some sense is several centers one and within the other, the first center is the surface of it is what's called the heart chakra. The deeper center than the heart chakra is the lataif level, Sufi level of the Lataiev. And it's called Akhfa, she's most hidden. And then a third level, what I call the Gurdjivian level of heart, which is the deepest level, which is function as a whole organ like a brain. And so all of us operate through all of these things, whether we know it or not. As you know, some people are more heartful than others, some people are more minority than others, some people are more physical than others. So we all have these three centers of operation. And the heart is one of those centers. And it is like a dynamic organ of experience. And when it comes to spiritual realization, it adds the sweetness and the passion of love, which is, it adds other dimension to experiencing our inner realization.

And amid. You alluded very briefly to love as a motivator, but it seems like this is a really central concept and dynamic in this trilogy as you and that love, and particularly initially anyway, and to some degree, it seems like almost throughout most of the path, the sense of love as a dynamic and the discontent that comes from it not being fulfilled seems like one of the most you point to as a really powerful psychological and spiritual and self transcending dynamic.

Yeah, I mean really the spiritual urge is more from the heart than anywhere else. Although some people can feel it more in the mind, like curiosity, wanting to know, wanting enlightenment or something. I want freedom from suffering. There's always love in it. Why do you want freedom from suffering if you don't love yourself? So love is implicit in all the motives for motivation for the inner journey and become much more explicit, much more magnified, highlighted, like more three dimensional, palpable when we experience it through the heart directly. Because love is really, I mean, it's implicit in all approaches to spiritual work, but it can become very explicit as wanting to know truth because you love it, wanting freedom because you love it. You know, it's not like we want freedom because we want to be free. That is true, but people love to be free. It's not only they want to feel freedom, they love the freedom without the freedom, they are unhappy, the same thing with them. So love is always there. But here it becomes the obvious central and the dominant and the most explicit way, motivation, drive of the spiritual urge called spiritual urge. Talk about Hammer Buddha, talk about Bodhicitta, which is the thought of enlightenment. All of these I think have heart in them. And in this teaching my experience, love has been the force.

And yet if I would have try to characterize much of the. Of the diamond approach from the whatever understanding I have, it seems like it's more been primarily a path of awareness. And now you're. And yes, of course the love has been there and implicit but. And I was kind of trying to feel how do you. What's the connector here? And I think you pointed to one of them, pointing out that you're. The central practice and method of the diamond approach, as I understand it is inquiry. And inquiry is love of the truth. Would you like to say something about the diamond approach path as most of it as compared to the path of love you're laying out here?

Yeah, and that's an interesting question. First of all, that the main methodology and approach is that of inquiry. Inquiry in our own experience. We inquire in our own experience because we want to know what the truth is, what is really happening, what's it about, what is it, where does it come from? And it doesn't go very far. There isn't love loving to know the truth. And to know the truth, I say it from the beginning. It has to be loving to know the truth for itself. Not for any reason, not for any accident. Not like I want to know the truth to be liberated. Not like I want to know the truth to be free from suffering. No, I just want to know the truth, simple. And the truth just keeps getting deeper and deeper and deeper until it become the most fondant, mundane truth. Because we want to know the truth. I mean Ramana Maharshi says his question is who am I? My question is what is the truth? Myself and everybody else you know, so. And they're both expression of love. And the thing about the path of love too is that I mean it through that approach is inquiry, which is understanding our experience. But to understand you have to feel it. So you have to feel it, experience it. So the heart is already there in the very from the beginning. Without heart there is no true inquiry. When I say inquiry, I don't mean inquiry into facts, I mean inquiry into experience. And experience is mostly is that of the heart really. The heart is not involved. Experience is not complete. It's not deep.

You also mentioned, Hameed, how there's a deep longing for the inner beloved, that this involves not just. Not just truth, as we would think as an intellectual process, but as a true hunger that could be even painful, that we want to find this inner beloved as the most important thing there is. And you said that Rumi's poetry, I guess after Sham Left Right, it broke his heart. And then he would talk about this deep yearning. And then sometimes he'd be talking from the direct experience of being there in it. Whereas poetry came some. So can you talk about maybe some of that painful searching and longing that's there in the heart as we. As we search for the inner beloved?

The path of the heart is full of aches, heartache, because it's all about being one with what we feel separate from. So the discontent that Raja talked about, we recognize at some point is a question of separation, of not being one with. With our true nature, which through the heart means what we love most. And so that separation, the more we feel that separation, the more painful it is because the separation becomes like an agony for the person who's following the path of the heart. It's like longing. There's separation, there's pain, there's grief. And in the book, I go through the different chapters and different stages, different ways. The path of the heart manifests and interesting. You know, in my experience, and usually in my experience, in my process, I had many threads happening at the same time. The thread of wanting to know the truth and the thread of understanding, the thread of finding out what reality is all about. But there was a little thread running through with all of them, which is a thread of knowing what is the inner beloved. So it wasn't like I was from the beginning wanting the inner beloved. I didn't know I wanted the inner beloved. It became clear at some point, oh, I'm estranged from the beloved of the heart. And when Tina tra. The thread had become stronger at some point, until it became the dominant thing for a while, until it culminated, until it completed itself.

And no other loves can come before this search, this quest for to know the inner beloved.

No, we have many loves. I mean, first of all, we have our. I mean, that's what the book goes through. We have our usual love, loving people, family, friend, loving thing, loving your cell phone, loving your car. All these are loves. And your favorite dessert, your loving the sport. You're loving sex, you're loving, you know, entertainment. All these are expression of love. All these involve love, but at some point become Clear if we are following the path of love. If the path of love opens up more strongly begin to dominate. That all of these are partial, they are cannot bring complete satisfaction. None of them will lead to the full satisfaction of the heart. And I was experiencing that over and over again, you know. And everybody will experience that. You can never have complete contentment satisfaction by any of those what I call worldly loves. Including of not only worldly love, even inner experiences people can experience, you know, presence, experience light and light consciousness and all the way to pure awareness and consciousness. It doesn't bring the total kind of satisfying contentment and talk about that's possible from being one with the inner beloved like that. There's a kind of contentment the heart knows it's missing. And I mean that is part of the guidance the heart knows, begin to know, begin to wake up and recognize. The contentment is not going to come from all the things I love. Not going to come from focusing in one thing I love in this world. A person or a thing or an activity. And then there is an inner turn that become no wake up. That thing that will satisfy most, as Kabir says is inside.

But once that's obtained that realization of the heart then you talk about you can go back into the world and be part of the world and love all these things you love not instead of. But because you realize the love is a source of everything. And this inner beloved is everything. So you can experience this love of the outer, supposedly outer things as a part of the same thing.

Yeah, I think you don't want to scare your readers. That's why you do it. You don't want to say you have to abandon, give up all these things only for the inner beloved. Because that's true. That's part of the path. Fear. Oh if I can't give up these love, how about I love them, I'm on them and I give them back. But we won't know even if we say it now when the process happen doesn't make a difference. You'll just feel you're losing all of these and focusing on. And then focus at some point become what is desirable, what is right. The focus on only one love and only the inner beloved of the heart. Which I don't see. I don't know. You don't know for a long time until it finally when the heart is completely cleansed, completely emptied of all other loves. That's where the book goes into details out the path of love is emptying the heart of all other loves. And I Call that polytheism? You're loving many gods and we have to go to monotheism, which is only one. And you don't know what this one is. Only the heart reveals it.

But it all turns out well in the end.

And then of course you will, because it's non dual. It shows its relationship to everything else and then shows that when we are one with the beloved, the beloved loves everything.

Can I read a verse that came to me? This is from Luke, chapter 14, verse 26. This is Jesus. He said, if any man come to me and hate not his father and mother and wife and children and brethren and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple. That's pretty hardcore. I believe what you're talking about.

Yes, he understood the way of love. And I beloved and Jesus path was a way of love.

And later on he says, if a man forsake not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple. So he's just putting this supremacy of this love before everything. And he was a Jew talking to Jews. So when he's talking about your mother, your father, your sisters, your brothers, I mean, family was everything for them. And saying you have, it's almost hate by comparison to the love of this beloved to be my disciple. It's a hard saying.

It is a hard. I wonder whether any of the disciples did it.

That's it.

Doesn't say, doesn't say he knew it. But it's hard and difficult to say because maybe some did, I don't know, I mean, I'm. I not privy to these things. But it is a difficult demand of the heart because it's exclusive. I said, and I beloved says, none will do. Get rid of all of them. Out of my home, my house, the heart, everything is out. Had to be completely clean, empty before I could show myself. Because that's why I say the inner beloved is like the most jealous Beloved won't have a hint of anything else, any thought of anybody else, anything else. And our beloved said, no, I won't show myself. It has to be 100% complete fidelity. And that is what I had to go through. You know, there was at some point, the experience, I mean, it's not like continuously for years. No, There was a gradual process until some point the process came. The heart became completely empty, completely devoid of anything else except the longing, the yearning for the inner beloved. That I didn't know, but I sort of intuitively knew. I wouldn't know if I saw it, but I wasn't seeing until at Some point it blazed out and amid.

Was there a certain point at which a kind of decision that okay, okay, I give up, or okay, I'm going to do it? Was there some decision point or was.

It more surrender, maybe?

Surrender? Yeah.

Well, I mean, it's. You can say both are involved, really. It's more like almost like a choice, like you have a choice, but it's really more. That's why the way of inquiry is useful here. I'm always inquiring into what's happening, you know, while I'm feeling the pull of love, the yearning. I'm inquiring into it, what's happening, how come it's not showing up, you know, and that's when I learned about the obstacle and all those distractions, you see. So there's an inquiry there going along with the bhakti attitude of the yearning, loving, wanting. And you know, Hameed, I want to.

Just draw attention to something you said in just very quickly there, which feels really important. You said, I'm always inquiring and pointing to the sense of continuity of practice every moment, inquiry. And it feels like continuity is so crucial no matter what one's practiced. And I just find it very inspiring and powerful to hear you say that. In every moment I'm inquiring.

Yeah. I mean, let's say it's not necessarily I'm intentionally inquiring every moment, but inquiry is going on because there's curiosity happening. I mean, at the present time, for instance, I'm not continuing inquiry. Inquiry happens by itself when it is needed, simply arises before. No, it was a focus, dedication and commitment and equally shows what is in the way of the commitment, you see, because the commitment, it's not just a decision. Your heart has to be engaged, your soul has to be engaged. What's making them not be engaged? You can't just push it, you can't just force it. The obstacle have to be seen and they have to dissolve. That's why inquiry is useful.

You know, you see in another place in this, the Inner Beloved book that love is not a affect, it's not an emotion, but that it is a powerful force that draws us in to the source of all things, that which we are at the deepest, deepest level. And so in some ways, it's the longing must be met by this, this powerful force that brings us back to who and what we truly are at the deepest absolute level.

Yes, that's exactly true. But you see, there is longing because there is love. The longing is an expression of love yearning, an expression of love. The Heartache is an expression of love. If you don't have love, there's no heartache, there's no yearning. Love is underneath all of these. And love here, you know, it begins as a human love, but it goes deeper into what I call essential love, spiritual love, all the way to divine love and moving on to different kinds of love that I mentioned before, but different intensities and depth and power that love takes. And I equate love and heart together, because light is the function of the heart. When the heart is really active, is open, its function is to move us towards the inner beloved. I mean, the heart has many functions. It feels and sensitive and empathic. All it does that in life. However, during the inner journey, it is a force that takes us into the depth.

Stay tuned for part two of our dialogue with Hameed, in which we dive into the passion, ecstasy and challenges on the path of the heart, the journey to the inner beloved. Thank you very much for being a part of this conversation. We hope that you were moved, as we are moved, being 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. So if you would like to help us to mainly to get this podcast out to more people, because the bigger audience have, which is steadily growing, but the more people we can reach and the more marketing we can do, the more positive effect we can have on the world. 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 and I find it's very satisfying. So thank you for your help, thank you for your presence and thank you for all you are and all you do.